Product Description

In this witty, Borges-like Novel, A. S. Byatt weaves a dazzling fiction out of one man's search for fact. Fed up with stultifying criticism, Phineas G. decides to study the messiness of 'real life'. Doing nothing by halves he sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a 'whole life' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: disconnected typescripts, bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of photographs. Trails run cold and mysteries are unresolved.Phineas feels he is hunting shadows. Like a shaman flying across the globe, his mind tracks the journeys of his subjects to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science. He meets others building wholes from bits and pieces: taxonomists, ecologists, even travel agents offering the trip of your dreams. In the process he also puzzles out his own future - but which woman will guide him out of the labyrinth? Tantalising, comic and rueful, The Biographer's Tale is a modern delight, a colour-filled novel of detection and desire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156950 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The world of erstwhile post-structuralist literary critic Phineas G Nanson turns upside down when he abandons the abstractions of theory and embarks upon a factual voyage into the realms of biographical empiricism. Dryly inspired by one of his tutors, the indigent and orotund Ormerod Goode, Phineas starts writing a biography of Scholes Destry Scholes--a biographer. Hooked by Scholes's scholarly multi-volumed biography of Victorian polymath Sir Elmer Bole, Phineas enters the mysterious world of the biographical form, "a despised art because it is an art of things, of facts, of arranged facts". Phineas discovers that facts, when piecing together the story of a life, are not only elusive and inconclusive, but liable to turn out to be fiction.

The Biographer's Tale is about how a would-be biographer goes in pursuit of his subject, and inadvertently finds himself along the way. A dry, nervous cipher at the outset, Phineas develops into a character as the tale progresses. He goes from loneliness to double love with a taxonomist and a radiologist. The earthy Fulla, "a Scandanavian nature-goddess" inducts him into the sensual exterior of life and the organic links that hold it together. Obsessed with bees and beetles, Fulla shows Phineas how human life is dependent upon a fragile ecosystem that philosophers of the self rarely pause to consider in their flights into the existential nature of being. Radiologist Vera who "photographs our invisible lives" reveals to Phineas the usually invisible world of the inner body, and enables him to venture to the interior of himself.

Entranced with two women, admiring and envious of the love between his peripatetic gay employers and terrified of one of their most important clients, Phineas finds that his biographical subject leads him into the words and worlds of Darwin, Galton, Linnaeus, Ibsen and Pearson. Byatt's theme is, typically, both labyrinthine in its complexity and crystalline in its simplicity. In its complexity, The Biographer's Tale is an investigation into contemporary intellectual currents and their relation to the philosophical and natural truths of nineteenth century thought. In its simplicity, it is a book about how we tell ourselves stories.

This is a novel that pokes fun at the solipsistic excesses of over-serious academe. It is nonetheless scholarly in its own construction, and readers should expect a challenging read. Byatt's particular achievement is to embody the positions of contemporary intellectual thought and make them into characters too. Empiricism becomes a phlegmatic, generally reliable but poseur-like armchair traveller whose failing is to elide cracks and conceal discontinuities in reality. Post-structuralism becomes a pugnacious sceptic querying the premise of selfhood with a weakness for revelling in ambivalence and the shiny surfaces of things--and delightfully annoying in its persistent questioning of the order of everything.

Truth, lies, love, history, self-knowledge--Byatt enables the reader to choose their route through Phineas's Bildungsroman. Pitching headlong into a very topical British cultural obsession with the nature of biography, The Biographer's Tale walks lightly the knotty tightrope between fact and fiction, and leaves the reader to decide on what is the difference between the two. As Phineas discovers, "There are very few human truths and infinite variations on them...Reading and writing extend--not infinitely, but violently, gut giddily--the variations we can perceive on the truths we discover." --Rachel Holmes

About the Author
A.S. Byatt is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include Possession, and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Elementals and The Little Black Book of Stories.

Customer Reviews

Very disappointing
Perhaps I am not the target readership for this book, but I have enjoyed A S Byatt's work and was delighted to spot what was, to me, a new one. It claims to be about a man discovering himself while trying to discover about someone else. I found it to be a lot of lengthy, often turgid, text with literary and other references which swamped any other aspect of the book. I did finish the book, but boy was it a struggle!

Typically modern read in ' research first story second style
A typical modern novel. The amount of research involved in the endeavour clouds all hope of following plot and/or characterization. It seems to have been written for a clique of other novelists who will be impressed with the erudition and learning. Ms Byatt, I know how clever you are; you don't have to keep on impressing me with the depth of your reading and your research. I would just occasionally like to read a modern novel that tells me something about the human condition, gives me real characters in the real world about whom I actually care, and tells me an entertaining story. Or am I simply dreadfully old-fashioned, darling.

A challenge, but worth the effort.
Byatt herself calls this, " A patchwork, echoing book" and like a patchwork, it is easy to sometimes lose the pattern, but I found that it was worth reading to the end, even though the protagonist (the biographer of the title) was a little irritating at times. The two female characters (Vera, blue-grey night person, and Fulla, golden ,electric day person ) are detailed and convincing, as are the two gay colleagues. There were times when I was impatient reading the index cards which are an essential and authentic part of the story as I wanted to get back to the action part of the plot. These could, in all fairness, be skimmed over at a first reading. If you enjoyed "Possession" then you will find parallels in "The Biographer's Tale," and certain cameos that share similarities. "Possession" is ultimately more satisfying as it has a stronger story-line and a more likeable male character, but both books show how astonishingly erudite Byatt is, and how patient in putting together all the clues without giving away a premature solution. This is not an easy read, but it did intrigue me and it seems to hold out the promise of "Read me again and you'll find even more than you did before."