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Loading... Possession: A Romanceby A.S. Byatt
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A fantastic interweaving of the present with the past. Two contemporary scholars fall in love while researching Victorian poets. Well done. (  ) checkadawson | Nov 3, 2009 |  A beautiful love story in Victorian England parallelled with a love story in the 1990´s. Clever and imaginative, it depicts a secret romance between two Victorian authors and a budding reletionship between two academics of today. Beautifully written and captivating. (  ) Bookoholic73 | Oct 23, 2009 | Possession is a many-layered story, cutting back and forth between the past and the present, of two modern scholars who find a set of lost letters between two Victorian poets and go on a quest to discover the truth of their affair. I love its richness of voice: the modern-day narrative focusing on the two scholars, Roland and Maud; the poetry and letters of the poets; diaries, biographies, letters, journals of many other characters. On my latest readthrough, I found myself thinking a lot about the levels of meaning of the title, of how many things "possession" can mean; Roland and Maud are possessed by Ash and LaMotte and their search for them, while themselves seeking to possess their secrets; each pair of lovers negotiates their terms of possession of each other; and there's a very pragmatic question of who is the true possessor of the letters. It's a marvelous mix of academia, mystery, romance, and fantasy, written in lovely, rich prose. ( )2  gwyneira | Oct 14, 2009 | I have had this book on the shelf for several years, and finally decided to read it, in support of my recent interest in understanding romance. It was somewhat tedious. The protagonist, Roland Michell, an English lit PhD without many job prospects, finds letters of a fictional poet (Henry Randolph Ash) that suggest he might have had an affair. In the course of researching the affair, Roland has a love affair of his own, with a professor of literature who is an expert, and possible descendent, of the woman Ash had loved. The book is built on long Victorian letters, poetry by Ash and his lover LaMotte, journals by others who knew them, and by imagined scenes from the life of the poets. There is a sub-plot concerning the antics of an aggressive American collector of Ash material, and arguments about copyright ownership of the letters. I skipped much of the endless poetry, enjoyed some of the fantasy tales, could not care much about the antics of the literature professors in the book. (  ) neurodrew | Oct 11, 2009 | I loved this book. It's been a long time since I read a book that kept me this involved. I definitely want to read it again, but this time with the Oxford Companion to English Literature. I'm sure there are all sorts of telling things in the poetry that would make the story that much richer, if I only got the references. ( ) pksteele | Oct 4, 2009 | 
 This is a romance, as the subtitle suggests, but it's a romance of ideas — darkly intricate Victorian ideas and modern academic assembly-line ideas. The Victorian ideas get the better of it.  Shrewd, even cutting in its satire about how literary values become as obsessive as romantic love, in the end, “Possession” celebrates the variety of ways the books we possess come to possess us as readers. I won't be so churlish as to give away the end, but a plenitude of surprises awaits the reader of this gorgeously written novel. A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because ''Possession'' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679735909, Paperback)"Literary critics make natural detectives," says Maud Bailey, heroine of a mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters, and dusty journals. Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser-known "fairy poetess" and chaste spinster. At first, Roland and Maud's discovery threatens only to alter the direction of their research, but as they unearth the truth about the long-forgotten romance, their involvement becomes increasingly urgent and personal. Desperately concealing their purpose from competing researchers, they embark on a journey that pulls each of them from solitude and loneliness, challenges the most basic assumptions they hold about themselves, and uncovers their unique entitlement to the secret of Ash and La Motte's passion.Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize--the U.K.'s highest literary award--Possession is a gripping and compulsively readable novel. A.S. Byatt exquisitely renders a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel--the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination--into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue. --Lisa Whipple (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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