Customer Reviews

Little Black Book of Stories

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

There is an axiom that states "Don't judge a book by its cover." In this case, the black fading into charcoal gray dust jacket (with a flowering golden sprig) is a precursor of things to come. The stories are dark, somber and brilliant. Who else could construct a series of stories where grief, anger and abuse are manifested in such creative, innovative and bizarre ways?

A woman loses her mother. The relationship, while lightly touched upon, was probably an inseparable one (the daughter states, "She was the flesh of my flesh. I was the flesh of her flesh.") Post the mother's death, her daughter begins to turn to stone but not just any stone; she begins layer by layer to manifest the various exotic stones found in Iceland. They are veined, with complex glints of underlying colors and multiple hues.

Then there is an Icelandic sculptor who goes to enormous difficulty to bring her rigid, statue-like self back to the land of his ancestors. Was this all a metaphor for a woman who was experiencing grief? An unmarried woman, the reader might conjecture, who was faced with an enormous personal transformation without her mother? One who needed a sculptor to introduce her to the real and essential self whom she had not previously recognized?

The bizarre journey proceeds as the reader meets the members of a writing class, experiences the rich memories of its oldest class member, as she describes everyday life when running a household was much more labor intensive. There was the cast iron stove to be kept highly polished on a daily basis, the laundry that was to be boiled, stirred and immersed into multiple rinses. Then came the laborious ironing! The woman's writings depicted a gentle, hardworking woman, and an anachronism to other class members who tore her writings apart because of their being perceived as commonplace. Who is she really? The writing class teacher later discovers part of her mystery...much to his horror!

A pink ribbon is the only adornment of a woman whose very self is being lost to dementia. Through a "tarted up" ghost, the reader discovers her in retrospect. To say more is to spoil!

Byatt is a genius! The stories might seem just that ... short stories. It's the pondering and opportunities for analysis that the stories invite. There exist many possibilities for each of the characters, their lives, their challenges, their joys and obstacles. Byatt layers her challenges to the reader. On the surface, what were the stories about? But beneath the layers, what were the stories really about?

To write like this, to really write like this, what power! These stories take hold of the mind like the great myths of the past. The sentences are crisp and clean, and simple in the way the best of all great writing is simple, with a simplicity that stirs to life the deep complexities of the subconscious. If I could write like this I would die happy.

This is my first foray into Ms. Byatt's work and I wanted something in short doses that I could read on the train on my way to work. However, I was also a bit disappointed. Her prose style is spare and austere and interesting for that reason. I must admit, I liked her writing style, which is probably the only thing about her stories that accounts for the adjective "eerie" in so many of the descriptions of these stories. But I must agree that further description of these stories as horror or "dark" is not so. They are contemplative and moody and occasionally thought-provoking, but not so much that I felt grabbed or hooked or even very much-compelled to keep turning the pages. And please do not dismiss my remarks as coming from someone who does not appreciate fine literature when she sees it. While I can't speak for others who did not like the book, for myself, I count The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables, Jane Eyre, Austen's works, Dicken's works, and others among my favorites, in addition to works by more modern and less 'classic' writers such as Douglas Coupland, Chuck Pahluniuk and Tom Robbins. If I were to put my finger on it, the stories attempt to conjure a depth of plot and of character that simply isn't there when all is said and done, and instead leaves you with a sense that it's all just a touch overly maudlin/melodramatically sappy to be taken seriously as a worthwhile read. Not for the reader interested in genuinely intellectually and/or emotionally stimulating reading.

British author A.S. Byatt reached her artistic pinnacle in the erudite, exquisite "Possession." But she's still in excellent form in "Little Black Book of Stories," a simple short story collection that embraces the tender, the macabre, and the fantastical, all wrapped in her lush prose.

"The Thing in the Forest" opens with a pair of young girls wandering in the woods -- only to come across a ghastly, inhuman monster. That monster haunts their memories as they grow up separately. "Body Art" tells of a obstetrician and his strange quasi-romantic relationship with a messed-up art student, which raises questions about birth, death and love.

"A Stone Woman" is born after surgery, when Ines finds that her body is slowly changing into a form of living stone. "Raw Material" takes a nasty twist, when a creative writing class, and a strange story, ends in murder. And "The Pink Ribbon" introduces James, an old man caring for his senile wife Mado... until a strange young woman with a connection to Mado comes into his life.

The thing that links the parts of "Book" together is the fantastical and horrific. "Body Art" is the one that doesn't fit in, since it's all solidly set in the real world; but the rest is a mass of Icelandic troll-women, ghosts of people who are still alive, and the Loathly Worm. Even "Raw" is a horror story, based on the evil that people can do.

Byatt's stories are beautifully self-contained, even if they don't always end on a completely conclusive note (the exception being "Thing," which feels unfinished). And her writing is still outstanding, flexible and versatile; she can write like a child or an intellectual, a writer or a scientist. She goes slightly overboard describing the various kinds of stone that the "Stone Woman" turns into, but that's a minor detail.

Richly-written and wonderfully evocative, "Little Black Book of Stories" is a rewarding if slightly flawed collection of Byatt's latest. An excellent way to pass a sunny afternoon.

Although billed as "fairy tales for grown-ups" like the author's earlier collection, THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE'S EYE, fantasy plays a major part in only one of the five longish stories in this book, and two are entirely realistic. But they are connected nonetheless by a strong sense of the fabulous, for all five are about the making of stories themselves, or the ways in which art is hewn out of life.

Sometimes literally so. The central story, "A Stone Woman," features a middle-aged woman who feels herself turning slowly into stone, and her friendship with an Icelandic sculptor engaged in the reverse process, of finding the life hidden in rocks and boulders. The woman's observation of her own transformation shows Byatt's writing at its most iridescent: "She saw dikes of dolerites, in graduated sills, now invading her inner arms. But it took weeks of patient watching before, by dint of glancing in rapid saccades, she surprised a bubble of rosy barite crystals, breaking through a vein of fluorspar, and opening into the form known as desert rose, bunched with the ore flowers of blue john."

Compare the simplicity with which the book opens: "There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest. The two little girls were evacuees, who had been sent away from the city by train, with a large number of other children. They all had their names attached to their coats with safety-pins, and they carried little bags or satchels, and the regulation gas-mask." As the simple details pile up, Byatt takes us back, not just into childhood, but the specific childhood of Londoners of our generation at the start of the Blitz. Rather at C. S. Lewis does at the start of THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE, she creates a context of dislocated reality, in which fabulous things can happen. Lewis's children grew up and had to leave Narnia behind, but Byatt's two schoolgirls are affected for the rest of their lives, though in different ways. One seeks refuge in objectivity and becomes a scientist, the other becomes a storyteller, but both feel a strong need to revisit this first magic at least once in later life.

In "Raw Material," a teacher of creative writing praises the work of an older student of extraordinary talent, but is ignorant of the real-life circumstances that give rise to it. In "The Pink Ribbon," the husband of a woman suffering from senile dementia (itself a form of story-making), receives a surprise visitor who persuades him to rewrite the narrative of his marriage from another perspective -- a situation not unlike the ending of Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT. And in "Body Art," a male gynecologist strikes up a friendship with a homeless art student who is creating Christmas decorations for his hospital. But what begins as an artistic debate gradually begins to invade real life, eventually taking a physical form that leaves both of them changed.

These are five varied stories that will amuse, challenge, move, and chill their readers by turns, leaving them above all with a sense of wonder at the mysterious human power of telling stories -- especially when the voice is that of such a master as A. S. Byatt.

I love A.S. Byatt. Hers is a voice full of magic, her stories incomparable. Having read The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, I couldn't wait to read another one of her collections of short stories. The Little Black Book of Stories offers dark, disarming vignettes with a touch of magical realism. Reading between the lines is required in most of the stories. My favorites are "The Thing in the Wood," "Raw Material," "Body Art," and "The Pink Ribbon." The aforementioned stories are written with beautiful, magical prose. I marvel at this author's literary talent. I cannot wait to read more of her stuff. In the meantime, I recommend this amazing, evocative effort...

Art, life, death, and nature collide in this new collection of short stories by A.S. Byatt. In 'The Thing In The Forest" two girls encounter a horrible creature that has resonating effects into their adult lives. In 'Body Art', a young doctors involvement with a young art student brings unexpected results. In 'A Stone Woman' (which I found the most haunting, original, and captivating)a woman slowly begins to morph into stone. "Raw Material' concerns a creative writing teacher and his near obsession with the work of a student of his. Lastly,'The Pink Ribbon'(also exceptional), is about an elderly man taking care of his wife who is losing her mind. One evening a young woman shows up at their door running from someone, but it seems she might be more than she says she is. Beautiful, rich, and evocative prose move through all the stories although the two I mentioned above in parenthesis seem standouts both in content and resolution. I've heard the book categorized as modern "horror", and upon finishing I can see how that general classification could happen. Yet they are much more literary works that seem to delve more into the horrors of the human mind and heart, than any external modern monster or demon that floods the pages of books today.

Most of A. S. Byatt's works belong in my category of "Favorites" but this one lacks the depth of her usual writings - perhaps it is because of the genre to which this one belongs. Little Black Book of Stories is a text for a class in my Masters in English studies.

I first discovered A.S. Byatt's work a few years ago when I picked up this book, quite honestly because the cover was pretty. This little volume hooked me into her style right away, and I've devoured all of her other works since.
Her short stories have a quality that is so unique - many of them are set in the real world that we know, but have that one element of fantasy, mystery, or horror that tips them over the edge and makes for fascinating writing. "A Stone Woman" is my favorite in this collection, the story of a woman who, in her grief for her mother (and after a minor operation of her own), finds that she is slowly becoming encrusted in a kind of stone casing that slowly encompasses her whole self. The descriptions of her transformation are so vivid you can almost feel the crystals on your own skin, and hear them clinking as the woman moves.
Each story is a work in its own right, and each has its own merit as a piece of art. If I remember correctly, a review inside the book calls the stories "gems," which is precisely what they are - gems of stories to be discovered and treasured. If you're looking for an introduction to Byatt's style and artistry, this one is for you.

This was a great little book of stories. I wanted something I could read that was short and entertaining. The only story I did not "get" was the "Stone Woman." I think because it was totally fantasy and I am more a mystery, thriller, horror type of reader. It was interesting though and I kept coming back for more and trying to figure it out. On the flip side, my favorite story was "Raw Material." We are all left with questions on that one, but we share those questions and don't feel we are the only ones left out of the loop.

I recommend this book as I enjoyed it very much.

Kate