Still Life

This book, the sequel to The Virgin in The Garden is, or is an attempt to be, somewhat confusingly, about everything under the sun, particularly in the light of the sun as Van Gogh saw it, or in the light as Van Gogh described it to his brother Theo in his letters, or as the character, Alexander, who writes a play based on Van Gogh's life conceives of how Van Gogh saw it based on these letters - at least this is part of it. Let me say something here that I've never said before to the prospective reader: DO NOT BOTHER WITH THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE HIGHLY STEEPED IN ALL THINGS LITERARY. - The scene I identified with most in this book was my favourite character, alas, Stephanie's crying for her book of Wordsworth's poems, while she was undergoing painful contractions and about to give birth to her first child! I've done the same thing in a dire situation in a hospital, and screamed for my books....as soon as they let me off the ventilator. - Personal anecdotes aside, you simply aren't going to be on Byatt's wavelength unless you are some sort of litterateur. There are so many allusions, intentional or not, that it doesn't seem to me that you need bothering with this book if they don't register with you. It's no use saying that you may skip the literary parts of the book, for THEY ARE the book. For instance, during what I suppose we'll call one of Byatt's "authorial interludes," for which the other reviewers have taken her to task - near the end of the book, she describes Daniel "like the seventh wave ready to break against the harbour wall." Do you know what the "seventh wave" is, prospective reader? Unless you've read a great deal of and about Tennyson, you won't. And, you'll have nobody to tell you what it signifies, except me. The seventh wave is a rewriting of Tennyson's "ninth wave" from "The Coming of Arthur" in his "Idylls of The King":"Wave after wave each mightier than the last`Til last, a ninth one, gathering half the deepAnd full of voices, slowly rose and plungedRoaring, and all the wave was in a flame"I won't get into why it was changed to the seventh is most scholarly editions. It's enough for this review to know that it was. Anyway, this is just one example (the last I noted in the book) among many of the in-depth literary allusions here. Well, I suppose if the two quotes from Proust, en Francais, and the Latin quote from The Venerable Bede, serving as introductions here, don't discourage you, this allusion won't either.But for all this intellectuality, Byatt is to be commended for her unflinching portrayal of the mundanities of family life. A particularly lengthy passage which gives an intensely detailed, almost pointillist, description of diaper-changing comes to mind. And, for all Byatt's literary pyrotechnics (which I rather enjoyed), what she is all about here, in different ways in portraying Stephanie, Frederica, Daniel, Alexander, Rafael and all the other characters is exploring what is classically known as the mind/body problem. In other words: What does it mean to be a creature with a mind? How does one get on at all?Almost the last words from the gentle, Wordsworthian Stephanie's lips before the "accident," as she attempts to comfort Gabriel's wife about his, hm, amorous proclivities, are, "Energy is sex, in many ways, good and bad."If this statement makes sense to you, reader, then, despite everything, plunge into the book. This Potter family doesn't need wands to make it magical.

What may be off-putting for some is that the author is British and the book is aimed primarily at a British audience. An audience well read in their literarure, and well versed in their culture of the period, the 1950s.Challenging but all the more interesting and rewarding for those up to the challenge.And there are two more books in the quartet!

Second in A.S. Byatt's ongoing Yorkshire quartet (the first and third novels are "The Virgin in the Garden" and "Babel Tower") I couldn't put Still Life down from the moment I picked it up. Tracing the Potter clan's lives through Stephanie's childbirth (and lingering chillingly on the degrading way mid-50's medicine treated expectant mothers), Still Life is one of the few books I've read in many years that brought me to the verge of tears. Strongly recommended.

I have a Ph.D. In linguistics and I could not get through the first page. She repeats adjectives in the same sentence and her sentences are four miles long. She must be writing for an audience of 1- herself. However, I'm sure others like it. I don't need a sentence with 4 clauses to understand that the grass is green.OMG

I had read the other books in Byatt's Yorkshire series but it took me a while to wade through Still Life. Of course, there is much to like. Byatt is extraordinarily observant and thoughtful and her passion for intellectual ideas for their own sake is exciting, when it doesn't become so stultifying that it drowns out the plot entirely. I admit to skipping some sections in which a character would have a 4-page internal debate about some obscure corner of artistic theory.The core plot concerns the contrasting choices of two sisters from the same intellectual family in 1950s England. Stephanie, the older sister, chooses the life of a married mother and struggles to find any sense of self while constantly serving others with body and spirit. Fredericka chooses to work briefly in France and then get a university education at Cambridge, and her life and mind spiral open to new opportunities and ideas while she sleeps with various men, trying to figure out her place as a bright, independent woman. The main problem for me was that the Stephanie sections, while well-observed, tipped their hand so heavily that the metaphor of being "crushed by domesticity" started to feel overwrought. Literally no one in Stephanie's life can or does help her with anything, ever, so of course being a housewife is spiritually crushing. Ironically, one of the key themes of the whole series is that Fredericka's romantic life is much less important, ultimately, than the friends she makes and the intellectual ideas that she discovers. But it doesn't seem to occur to Byatt to apply this to Stephanie and recognize that the real problem for Stephanie is not necessarily that she has chosen to be a housewife but that she has absolutely no friends of her own in the book (and is incapable of even recognizing a need for them) and thus is of course isolated and miserable, in spite of loving her husband. Young mothers generally survive by meeting and getting help from other young mothers, and the book never examines that aspect of Stephanie's utter isolation, but seems to presume that all mothers are forced to be isolated and crushed. Byatt is trying her hand at a Middlemarch-type story about women and lost opportunities, but weighs the scales so heavily against domesticity that it hardly seems like an interesting fight.Overall, this is a book with marvelous ideas but a center of misery that can make it hard to get through. All the same, it's Byatt, and she's always worth reading for the best parts, if you can make it through the tangential flights of intellect and the suffocating loss of self of one of the main characters.

Like this set of books and am currently reading number 4. Very well written but a bit 'clever'. I often have to look things up.

Many thanks for this book. It was recommended by a friend, who had read it three times. It evokes a now vanished age, and is carefully and intelligently written, as one would expect form this writer. Part of a quartet of autobiographical novels.

I just love anything A S Byatt writes. Arrived in good condition and very quickly. Would recommend to anyone who enjoys good writing and a good story.

There are times when, unable to come to terms with what one is reading, one asks oneself, 'Is it me or is it the book?'In this case, reluctantly, I say 'It's the book'.I found it unreadable. I made it three-quarters of the way through and then started skimming. From time to time I tried to resume measured reading and each time I failed within a paragraph or so.I have no doubt Mrs Byatt is a fine writer. Her prose is immaculate. Her details convince. occasionally she shocks the reader with her descriptions - her account of a first birth was riveting.But this pales to nothing when she cannot breathe life into her key characters. Frederica is pure cardboard. Here she is a Cambridge. A young and attractive and very bright woman in the Fifties, a gift for a novelist, and yet she never got off the page and into my head. Nor did her numerous acquaintances. Family members fared better, particularly her brother and brother-in-law - these were good in the preceding novel in the sequence too.And there's the writing, pages of it, on art, colour, God, the Church, and more. I know it was meant to relate to the novel in some way but just how I could not grasp.I read and enjoyed the earlier book where Frederica is a sixth-former ambitious to be an actress and to lose her virginity. To begin with I thought Still Life was going to be better. I was, however, deceived. At some point I may go on to volume three - but not just yet.

I haven't yet encountered an author who as realistically describes the human experience of living in the real and practical, the academic, the poetic, the scientific and the spiritual 'worlds' at once, as I guess most humans, aware or not, must attempt to do. The series is strangely relaxing to read in it's realism.