The Biographer's Tale [Large Print] [Paperback]

A. S. Byatt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2001

From the award-winning author of Possession and Angels and Insects comes an ingenious new novel about love and literary sleuthing: a dazzling fiction woven out of one man's search for fact.
It tells the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted young graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of "real life" by writing a biography of a great biographer. For what could be more real than biography, the "art of things, of arranged facts"? But Phineas quickly discovers that facts can be unreliable, and a "whole life" hard to find. No matter how hard he tries, he unearths only fragments--disconnected manuscripts, bones and husks, strands of poetry, boxes of marbles, undated photographs. How does one put together the idea of a person?

Phineas tracks his subjects' journeys to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic in a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic, scientific and erotic. He meets others who are building wholes from bits and pieces: a beautiful radiographer, ecologists, anthropologists, even travel agents offering the trip of your dreams. But they seem only to make his task more difficult. And as he tries to sort through the cabinet of curiosities that is the past, he must also decide his own future, and face the most difficult puzzle of all: which woman will guide him out of this dizzying labyrinth and back into his own life?

With The Biographer's Tale, A. S. Byatt--hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for 1,001 nights"--asks provocative questions about our perennial quest for certainty, about "truth" in biography, about the nature of the imagination and the meaning of meaning, even as she spins a tantalizing yarn of detection and desire.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A.S. Byatt chronicles the life of the mind with the immediacy other novelists bring to the physical world. So when the graduate-student hero of The Biographer's Tale announces that he needs "a life full of things," we take his words with a grain of salt. Yes, Phineas G. Nanson has renounced the "cross-referenced abstractions" of life as a postmodern literary theorist, and vows to ground himself in what he warily calls the "facts" (the quotation marks are definitely in order). Yet he first forays into empiricism by reading a three-volume life of the Victorian traveler, writer, and diplomat Elmer Bole--then immediately undertakes a biography of Bole's biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes.

Things, as Nanson discovers, can prove just as slippery as ideas. His research quickly leapfrogs beyond the biographer to his other subjects: scientist Carl Linnaeus, playwright Henrik Ibsen, and eugenicist Francis Galton, all of whom Destry-Scholes chronicled in three unpublished, unfinished, and, as it turns out, well-embroidered accounts. Meanwhile, our hero continues his forays into the real world. He takes a part-time job with a pair of gay travel agents, who arrange some very specialized vacations, and meets up with a Swedish bee taxonomist named Fulla, who wants to save the world. He also unearths a perplexing series of Destry-Scholes's index cards, full of sketches, facts, quotations, and unattributed lines of verse. These he attempts to shuffle into some kind of order, even as the enigmatic figure of the biographer himself seems to appear and disappear from view.

There are echoes here of Byatt's Booker Prize-winning Possession, another detective story for the MLA set. Yet The Biographer's Tale is an altogether odder--and chillier--sort of book. It is, in fact, almost terrifyingly learned, and wears its research about as lightly as a pair of Fulla's Ecco sandals. The mystery here is nothing less than the nature of mind, so it's no criticism to say that her characters have little life outside the ideas they represent. What's surprising is that the result is so readable, even beautiful at times. Here, for instance, is Nanson on truth and beauty:

There are a very few human truths and infinite variations on them. I was about to write that there are very few truths about the world, but the truth about that is that we don't know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be full of all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend--not infinitely, but violently, but giddily--the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover.

The index cards themselves can be painful to read (remember the ersatz Victorian poetry in Possession?). But persevere, dear reader--meaning emerges through the play of one esoteric piece of information against another, just as it does in real life. Byatt extends her philosophical variations as far as she giddily can, and in The Biographer's Tale, she has constructed an elaborate, glittering labyrinth at the center of which lie surprisingly simple truths. --Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

An intellectual romp that doubles as a detective story, Byatt's new novel finds her as imaginative, witty and provocative as ever. A postgraduate at a nameless English university, narrator Phineas G. Nanson decides to abandon his studies as a poststructuralist literary critic to become a biographer instead. He chooses as his subject one Scholes Destry-Scholes, who himself was a biographer of genius. Destry-Scholes's magnum opus was a biography of the Victorian polymath Sir Elmer Bole, a famous explorer, soldier, diplomat, scientist, travel writer, novelist and poetAin short, almost a caricature of a certain British type. As Nanson searches for clues to Destry-Scholes's life, the novel acquires layers of complexity. Nanson finds fragments written by Destry-Scholes about three men: Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen. Like Nanson, the reader realizes the identity of these figures only gradually, for the fragments are oblique and mystifying. To his dismay, Nanson discovers that the revered Destry-Scholes has taken great liberties with the facts, inventing false incidents and inserting imaginary details. This calls into question the whole issue of biographical accuracy and allows Byatt, who all along has been taking swipes at poststructural literary criticism, to introduce arch observations about the current fad of psychoanalytic biography. The plot broadens when Nanson falls in love with two women simultaneously: one is a Swedish bee taxonomist; the other is Destry-Scholes's niece, a hospital radiographer. This is only one of the many mirror images here, for Bole had also married two women. In addition to the theme of doubles and doppelg?ngers, Byatt's (Possession; Angels and Insects) familiar preoccupation with insects, myths, spirits, metamorphoses and sexuality all come into play. The book is an erudite joke carried off with verve and humor. American audiences may not be quite so patient as the British, however, in indulging Byatt's many tangents. This book will appeal to discriminating readers ready for intellectual stimulation. 7 illustrations. 40,000 first printing. (Jan. 24)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Thorndike Press (November 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786235233
• ISBN-13: 978-0786235230
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,538,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An acquired taste, December 14, 2000

By 

Rosanne Dingli (Karrinyup, Western Australia Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Biographer's Tale (Hardcover)

This book is not a light read. It is heavy, layered, rich and in some parts indigestible. Yes, like the best Christmas cake. It contains not only literary references, but scientific and historical ones. One is expected to know who Carolus Linnaeus was, and Galton, and Lyle. One is expected to smile at elevated jokes and nod at passing references to evolution theory, history of science, philosophy. One is expected to remember the trials and tribulations that related to literary fads such as deconstructionism and post-colonial feminism. However, there are other layers, that allow those readers intent on a story to find a narrative that engages. There is the eternal search for romance, the confusion and wonderment that accompanies a change in career direction. There is the uncertainty that comes when one meets a gay couple, or when one meets a person with a definite hard-wired hardcore sexual perversion. A S Byatt uses research like some people use mayonnaise. This is the novel you read not so much to pass the time, but to relish and savour, to wonder at in awe. How can one person have at one's disposal such a wealth and weight of knowledge? And... what have I missed by not knowing what was necessary to know?

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Researching Identity?, December 18, 2000

By 

Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Biographer's Tale (Hardcover)

This is a very literary book and an entertaining story, but you have to be in the mood. It is saturated with in-jokes. The long biographical bits can be very tedious if you don't like random bits of curious facts. It can easily be seen as pretentious. What grabbed me was that this novel is about the obsessive need to understand and possess another's identity. How much do we need to know to understand someone and what do we do when that understanding is found? Is history fixed or malleable? No answers are possible and this novel concedes to that point. It conveys a deep understanding that all this knowledge that we desperately acquire to know another must be gathered and dropped simultaneously if we are to gain any idea about another person's identity.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Missing Things, January 26, 2001

By 

Thomas W. Jensen "deathbreedon" (Salt Lake City, UT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Biographer's Tale (Hardcover)

Of all Byatt's fictions, I am most fond of the Frederica Potter trilogy, (hopefully tetralogy soon) and then "Possession." While the comparisons that have been made between "The Biographer's Tale" and "Possession" are apt, the differences reveal the reasons this was much less satisfying for me, despite its diverse and interesting expositions and fragments. Unlike the works I mentioned above, this book is much narrower with a smaller set of characters. In the hands of some novelists this leads to deeper, more interesting and ironic portrayal of character. However, I found the character's in "The Biographer's Tale," to be more remote and static, even though what they study is provocative. I suspect that Byatt's keen observation and imagination is at its best when it can focus on on the interactions of a broad and socially diverse set of people. Unfortunately, today's academic climate rarely provides that.

In general, Byatt's recent works seem more polished and less lively than her earlier work, polished to the point of preciousness in some cases. It may sound anachronistic in this post-post modern age, but I miss the flesh, blood, surprise and risk of her earlier work and the deep, believable characters that have remained with me for years.