What a claustrophobic book! There's really only one character; other people are mentioned but aren't in view much and never come to life.I'm not sure how (not why) I finished it.Story of a remarkably incompetant attempt to write a biography, in which a man finds his true self (travel agent / taxonomer) and ends up living a life of pseudobigamous bliss Or something like that. (Did Fulla and Vera know about each other?) Obvious parallel between Phineas and the man biographied initially: must look for others. ( )

Such a blatant and inferior rip-off of Possession that I think it gives Byatt grounds to sue herself.

Story of a would-be biographer biographing another biographer!!!
I'm a huge fan of AS Byatt but I always seem to get to one part of her books where I get bogged down by the detail and just have to move forward and pick up the story later. This one, I had to miss out most of the book - not for me, very disappointing. ( )

In A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, in which the author draws upon her many successes at fictive biography in The Possession and turns them into something very different here.

This is a sort of "meta-biography," an autobiographical work by someone trying to write a biography (after having given up literary theory for not having enough 'things' to work with). Like Byatt's other works, the novel is learned and complicated ... I found it a bit hard to concentrate on it at times. She brings in a wide range of scholarly interests, adding elements of artistic and scientific inquiry to her narrator/protagonist's plate as he delves into the researchers of his chosen subject and finds much more there than originally met the eye.

Byatt's ability to describe, lampoon and dissect the foibles of academia make this book worth reading. Her attempts to combine those elements with the expected (and long-delayed) romance (or romances in this case) fell flat for me. Passing those sections off as those of a narrator uncomfortable with writing about his own experiences seemed a bit of writerly hocus-pocus.

All in all, an adequate book, but not one I expect to have the urge to read again.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2008/... ( )

This is the story of a disenchanted graduate student, Phineas G. Nanson, who rejects his work in postmodern literary theory because he's sick of meta-analysis. He decides to substitute a project to write a biography of a reticent biographer. Though he has a desire to be wholly objective, his post-modern training forces him to own his subjectivity. As he collects material for the biography, he moves from a "meta" existence as an observer of observers, to being one of the observers himself, to being the subject of his own story.

The writing is simply beautiful. I'm not a big annotator, but I couldn't bear to let some of the lovely sentences slip by without a pencil mark in the margin, so I could find them again. Like this (p. 194):

"Looking back on my own times, what most strikes me is that we have developed endlessly subtle styles and techniques to reveal the secret meaning behind the apparent meaning, to open up the desires and assumptions behind what people say and explain about what they feel and believe. And all that can really be read into what we write is our own desire to translate everything, everyone, all reasoning, all irrational hope and fear, into our own Procrustean grid of priorities."

I read this book in a day, because the writing was just so pleasurable. I highly recommend it. ( )