Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A.S. Byatt's stories simmer with a sensuality and passion that, like topiary trees in a formal garden, are pruned and trained into cultivated shapes while retaining the wild scent of the orchard. In "Crocodile Tears" a woman walks away from a personal tragedy, deserting those she loves to try to reconcile herself to a death for which she feels horribly responsible. Thrown together in Nîmes with another exiled mourner, a Norwegian full of northern folktales, she ricochets between a numbed calm and a reckless urge for self-destruction. Together they begin to assemble some kind of personal solace out of fragments of European history, fiction, and myth, and so come to terms with their guilt. "A Lamia in the Cevennes" is also set in France, where another isolated English exile struggles for self-knowledge amid the shards of history and folktale. "Cold" is itself a kind of latter-day fairy story of ice princesses and sighing suitors. These are stories steeped in light and color, full of glowing landscapes and sensuous delights. Their intricately woven skeins of literary allusion and keenly observed locations bewitch the reader. Yet the figures in Byatt's landscapes seem powerless to derive pleasure or solace from their surroundings, picking their lonely way through the brilliance, carrying with them burdens of painful memories they cannot shake off. --Lisa Jardine, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

Brilliantly mingling reality with the surreal atmosphere of folktales and fairy tales, Byatt follows The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye with an equally virtuosic and beguiling collection. The subtitle is the key to the oppositions that inspire these six stories. They teem with contrasts between inexplicable compulsions and societal norms, the extremes of love and hate, the mysterious tension between the rational and the mystic, and between the creation of art and the demands of daily life. Byatt's meticulous control of language gives these narratives a visual and tactile dimension that's almost palpable. Permeated with descriptions of colors, temperatures and atmosphere, full of sensuous imagery, each is an immersion in a richly imagined world. A compulsion to flee from the reality of her husband's dead body sends the protagonist of "Crocodile Tears" to sun-drenched Nimes, where she meets a man from Norway who is researching folktales common to both regions. Slowly and agonizingly, each regains the ability to deal with loss. In "Cold," Fiammarosa, the princess of a mythical kingdom, can exist only in a frigid atmosphere, but she marries a prince from a desert realm where burning sand is spun into glass; the contrastAand the eventual mingling of the two polaritiesAis conveyed in passages of gorgeous description. The protagonists of most of these stories work in the creative arts or have strong ties to literature. (Interestingly, the central character of the one disappointing tale, "Baglady," a nightmarish scenario that lacks resolution, does not.) "The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it," says a painter, one of the characters in "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary." Byatt conveys this conviction via an unfettered imagination, an intense lyricism combined with distilled and crystalline prose, and an astute grasp of the contradictory impulses of human nature. Six illustrations. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 229 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (March 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375502505
• ISBN-13: 978-0375502507
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,093,204 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sensuous indulgence, February 23, 2000

By	maxine jones (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

Elementals. A S Byatt. Chatto and Windus. £12 (UK)

Subtitled 'Stories of Fire and Ice', A S Byatt's latest collection are works of sensuous indulgence. Occasionally her story-telling gifts are overwhelmed by the detail of her sensory observations, yet most readers will forgive this and allow themselves to be carried away by her mission to winkle out the truth of a subject through finding exactly the right words. In a similar way, the artist in 'A Lamia in the Cevennes' becomes obsessed with capturing the exact blue of his swimming pool. The challenge makes him happy, 'in one of the ways in which human beings are happy.'

In Crocodile Tears, Patricia has lost this ability to be happy. She notes her surroundings, the heat and history of Nimes, with sublime indifference. This opening story gets off to a flying start. Having argued with her husband as to whether a painting in a London art gallery is banal or not, Patricia rounds the stairs to see him lying dead at the bottom, surrounded by concerned couriers and paramedics. Hearing them pronounce him dead, she walks straight past, gets a train to Paris then south, eventually ending up at Nimes. A fellow guest in the hotel she has picked at random tries to bring her out of her grief: "You may sit there, glass-eyed while things slip past...crocodile fountains, the stones of this city. Or you may look with curiosity and live."

The same message is given in the final story: 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary'. An artist paints fish and eggs in a kitchen where the cook bemoans her fate. The artist tells her, "the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning."

Byatt paints beautiful word pictures for the reader to admire. In 'Cold' she builds them out of snow and ice and intricate glass palaces. In Jael she takes us into a posh girl's school where a pupil colours in a biblical picture with a bright red crayon. From here she recreates every nuance of the atmosphere of the school: "whenever I remember that patch of fierce colour I remember, like an after-image, a kind of dreadful murky colour, a yellow-khaki-mustard-thick colour, that is the colour of the days of our boredom."

The lyricism of the collection is balanced by a sharp, sometimes surreal, wit, as when the Lamia (half woman half snake) appears in the artist's pool and tries to seduce him, finally making do with his friend. In 'Baglady' a well-to-do wife accompanying her husband on a business trip to the Far East finds herself lost and penniless in the nightmarish Good Fortune Shopping Mall. A policeman moves her on with a stick. Throughout the book, fairytale and mythical elements combine with insights into modern life. This is a collection to be savoured slowly.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An exquisite little book, November 9, 1999

By A Customer

I found the opening story, "Crocodile Tears," rather disappointing, but things soon get better. "A Lamia in the Cevennes," about an artist who finds a lovely mythical beast in his swimming pool, offers another version of the old conflict between the artist's romantic ideal and harsh reality. The artist in question refuses to make the lamia turn human, with reason, as it turns out, since the beautiful and mysterious fantastic monster turns out to be a vulgar and rather stupid woman. "Cold" is the best of the book, a fairy tale about a woman of ice and a man of the desert who fall in love, with the inevitable clash, until the two are united in a palace of glass, which unites the beauty of ice, but comes from fire. The rest are little vignettes that range from the charming to the disturbing. As a whole, a treat.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories of extremes, December 13, 2000

By	"blissengine" (Norfolk, VA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (Paperback)

Byatt's collection of sumptuous stories reminded me of Banana Yoshimoto, Emma Donoghue, and Jeanette Winterson. These tales seem like modern faerie tales without the classic imagery. Or rather, with the classic imagery shifted. In "Cold", an ice princess discovers true love in a desert land. In my favorite in the collection, "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary", a cook finds the meaning of art in life. These tales of extremes of emotions, temperatures, lives are full of joy and life, and make many a reader celebrate. This will certainly not be the last book by Byatt I'll read.