Customer Reviews

The Matisse Stories

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Matisse paintings are more or less the inspiration for this short but insightful collection of stories. A.S. Byatt has done a wonderful job of incorporating insight and art into three compelling short stories. In "Medusa's Ankles" a middle-aged woman in a beauty salon reflects on her life and appearance while searching for a look that will allow her to recapture a small piece of her youth. "Art Work" is an insightful look into the lives of three different people and their personalities. We learn about a kind hearted and open minded woman, her stodgy and fussy husband and their frumpy but dignified housekeeper. Finally in "The Chinese Lobster" we are treated to an elaborate Chinese lunch where we hear two professors discuss Matisse's nude paintings while at the same time expounding the troubles of a suicidal student suffering from anorexia. A.S. Byatt does a wonderful job of capturing the feelings of self-loathing, insecurity and frustration to create a rich work of literary fiction. The stories are very atmospheric and filled with vivid imagery. This is a good introduction to the talents of A.S. Byatt.

Henry Matisse's paintings were solid, colorful, and strangely calming to just sit back and look at. A.S. Byatt's "Matisse Stories" have a similar effect (though the effect of Matisse and his artwork only really is established in the third story). A mixed bag of three stories, all focusing on women and Matisse's paintings.

"Medusa's Ankles" introduces us to an aging woman who is drawn into a hair salon by the "rosy nude," a Matisse painting. Her semi-friendship with the hairdresser deteriorates when he leaves his middle-aged wife for a pretty young girlfriend, forcing the woman to face her own aging and life."Art Work" introduces a very artistic couple and their eccentric housekeeper -- who has a few secrets of her own. And "Chinese Lobster" takes on the sobering topic of sexual harrassment, when a young art student files a suit against a visiting professor who is lecturing on Matisse. But it turns out that the student may be the problem...

Matisse is sometimes the center of these stories, but elsewhere you can barely find the poor guy. His paintings -- and the destruction of them -- is the center of "Chinese Lobster." But his art is only a minor part of the other two stories. Byatt's flair for description doesn't fail her now -- she paints vivid, lush descriptions of restaurants, hair salons and past memories. At the same time, she adds small "everyday" touches like live lobsters, little dishes, paints.

While both "Medusa's Ankles" and "Chinese Lobster" are solid, self-contained little stories, "Art Work" is something of a mess. It seems to focus on too many subplots (Debbie's feelings about giving up her work, her husband's artwork) before settling on one. And her descriptions of art galleries and so forth seem rather off, as if she has never tussled with them and isn't sure how it happens.

While "Art Work" bogs down the overall effect somewhat, "Matisse Stories" is a charming little (very little) collection for fans of the French artist. Pretty and sometimes thought-provoking.

Let me begin my review by stating that I am not a big fan of the "description-for-description's sake" school of writing, with supposed "beautiful" prose standing in for an actual story. Fantastic imagery and specific details can be a great addition to a book that is already succeeding with engaging characters and a forward-moving story, but on their own I just find it to be tedious. That said, Byatt's collection of three longish short-stories has within it moments and characters I found myself drawn to, and writing that I enjoyed the rhythms and construction of, but overall this was a bit of a task for me to read.

The first offering of Matisse-inspired stories, "Medusa's Ankles," was my favorite, probably because it involved conflict that was both internal and external, with an un-sympathetic protagonist who I found compassion and understanding for by its end. The third story, "The Chinese Lobster," makes more use of dialogue than mood or overly poetic language, but it ultimately stumbles in its aims by not giving the reader a situation or characters we can care a whit about.

By the time I got to the second piece, "Art Work" (yes, I read them out of order), my patience with the book was waning and I wasn't rewarded in my decision to save the longest story (50-plus pages) for last. Essentially an art history course wrapped in fiction, with palettes and colours and lack of colour and shadows explored in numbing detail, the story was a misfire for me at the start. Long passages of scenic and location-specific descriptions confuse and disorient, rather than ground and illuminate this reader before any characters are even witnessed, much less introduced. The characters then reveal themselves to be paper-thin, appearing only to allow Ms. Byatt to work her muscles of laundry-list style description and repetitive sentence-structuring. Overall, the whole experience of reading this felt like too much work for too little reward.

These three short stories about how women see our world --- the colors they see, the sounds they hear, the thoughts they think-- are truly remarkable for their philosophic depth and their word craftsmanship. In some ways, reading these stories (stories attuned to the everyday details of our lives); stories that describe the ringing of the phone, the belt buckle of the hairdresser; the color of the still-alive lobster in his "cage" with as much, if not more, attention as they do the "big themes" of life, death, and marriage. They are haunting, they are short and crisp and precise. The language flows gracefully and forcefully (though you do not notice the force until later; until you have closed the book).

And they stay with you.

A.S. Byatt, the Booker Prize winning author of "Possession," attempts an impressionistic portrait of the tension between aesthetics and emotion, with allusions to Who-Doesn't-Like-Matisse, and literary nods to Woolf and other masters of the ouvre. It's all so very pretty and stylized, and filled with such small ideas posing as BIG THOUGHTS. Imagine, Art as life! Life as art! Both and neither as everyday things that we just-took-for-granted!

In such an important book, little considerations like plausibility and nuance of character may be dispensed with. Consider the following summaries of Byatt's three easy pieces: Uptight scholar throws tantrum and wrecks a once Rubenesque styling salon gone Post-Modern; Lower classish maid/nanny controls her apparent controllers--an uptight editor and her uptight, once promising painter spouse, and then upstages the latter in a didn't-see-that-coming showing of her sculptures made from her employers' throwaways(!), and two uptighters: He, an impossibly drawn caricature of cruel academia; she--the only believable voice here--a Dean mollify his pathological ravings (and posible gropings) of a ambiguously portrayed but clearly troubled graduate student.

Byatt doesn't let our minds wander and think and fill in the blank spaces: She pretty much covers the entire canvas with starkly drawn, shallow pictures of these tightly-wound characters. Like the small-scale achievements of her protagonists, Byatt writes very fine miniatures--bursts of adjectives as metaphor here, a keenly observed, "revealing" detail there, but the whole mess comes apart if you step back and try to make sense of it-the opposite result of Impressionist work. As others have noted, Byatt focuses more on language and feeling and all that psychology stuff, but if these are embedded within fable-like set pieces we're not about to believe the actors' suppressed and repressed emotions, let alone their facades. I'm not sure who the joke's on when Byatt basically paints a word picture of a vulva in the first story, in which she also places "cunning" followed by "linguist" in the same paragraph. Perhaps this is Dada-esque subversion or a Fauvist attempt to awaken our senses.

The stories succeed only in a gigantic suspension bridge of disbelief. Rather than Impressionism, this strikes me as miniatures of superb writing set against a large trompe de l'oeil canvas, and, for the most part, the trompe is on us.

I read this somewhat as a prelude to "Posession", more as an introduction to Byatt's style than as an undertaking of itself. I was pleasantly surprised.

In all I've read spanning the ages from classical philosophies to post-modernist contemporary fiction, I found this novella higly satisfying. It is brief, concise, yet wants for nothing in either style or quality of thematic content. Using controversial impressionist paintings as a backdrop for finely-crafted fictional shorts is a grand idea and it has been executed in a true literary artist's fashion here.

I must strongly suggest this book to almost any reader of literature or fiction.

Let's get the worst out of the way first. These three stories range from pretty good to excellent -- with Byatt, how could they not? -- but they make slim reading for a stand-alone book. All the same, two of them at least are polished works of art, all the more fascinating for exploring that no-mans-land between the visual and the literary.

The Matisse connection is both peripheral and central. Peripheral, in that the stories all spring from somebody looking at, or thinking about, a Matisse. Central, in that Byatt attempts to map out the distinction between what can be expressed only in words, what only in paint, and what can be translated between the two. Her choice of Matisse as a touchstone is appropriate; one of the most genial and sensuous of artists, his works appeal directly to the retina and bypass the mind. Or seem to; there is more to him than meets the eye. Two of the three stories make the eye/mind distinction explicit. In one, an artist is tongue-tied discussing his paintings with a gallery owner: "He cannot tell her that they are not about littleness but about the infinite terror of the brilliance of colour, of which he could almost die, he doesn't think those things in words anyway." In another, a critic is said to find "language as sensuous as paint." Both characters into trouble with their views, but Byatt herself tackles the issue head-on. Almost as though to demonstrate the inadequacy of language, you can see her trying to splash words around like paint, as in this description of a boy with chicken pox anointed with calamine lotion: "He has the same skin too, but at the moment it is a wonderfully humped and varied terrain of rosy peaks and hummocks, mostly the pink of those boring little begonias with fleshly leaves, but some raging into salmon-deeps and some extinct volcanoes with umber and ochre crusts." Repulsively inappropriate, perhaps, but quite brilliant!

In the first story, "Medusa's Ankles," the visual element is secondary to the evolving relationship between a middle-aged woman and her hairdresser, who has a Matisse reproduction hanging in his salon. In the second, "Art Work," the connection appears to be even more contrived, since it begins with Byatt's own description of the Matisse reproduced on the book's cover, which has no literal place in the story at all. But all the characters in it are artists in one way or another, and Matisse becomes the measure of the differences between them, which in turn impacts their real lives. In the third, "The Chinese Lobster," two academics meet in a restaurant to discuss the work of an angry student engaged in a feminist dissertation on Matisse involving some radical desecration of his images. What begins almost as a philosophical discussion comes to reflect directly on the inner lives of all three characters, making this the most satisfying story of the three. But all are eminently worth reading (perhaps even buying).

I loved these stories! The writing is spare, elegant, yet still paints vivid pictures of loss, love, life. Wonderful to read...lyrical to the ears.

Beautiful, concise, intelligent and moving. One of my favourite books of recent years.

What a disappointment! I thought I purchase the edition with color illustrations of three Matisse paintings. Instead it was a poor quality binding, cover and with pencil drawings.

Pat Nuezel