From Publishers Weekly
From secret agonies to improper desires and the unthinkable, this slyly titled collection touches on more than a little bit of darkness. Booker Prize–winning author Byatt (
Possession) masterfully fuses fantasy with realism in several of these stories, packing a punch with her sometimes witty, sometimes horrifying examinations of faith, art and memory. In the stunning "The Thing in the Wood," two young girls, Penny and Primrose, sent to the countryside during the WWII London blitz, confront the unconscious come to life as a monster ("its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.... It was made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation"). They return in middle age to face the Thing again, but Penny, a psychotherapist, doesn't fare as well as Primrose, a children's storyteller. A lapsed Catholic gynecologist tries to rescue a starving artist in "Body Art," enacting what Byatt casts as the very obstructiveness of the Church he left behind. It's a chilling story that shines with grace. Byatt's modern-day fairy tale, "A Stone Woman," details a woman's metamorphosis from flesh to stone, which is both terrible and redemptive ("Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh"). In "Raw Material," a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the work of an elderly student who comes to a gruesome end, the student's life and death imitating bad art very unlike her own. The haunting final story of the collection, "The Pink Ribbon," about a man who is more troubled by remembering than by forgetting as he cares for his Alzheimer's-addled wife, turns on the appearance of the ghost of the wife's former self. With an accomplished balance of quotidian detail and eloquent flights of imagination, Byatt has crafted a powerful new collection.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Booklist
Byatt is commanding. Her prose is crisp and astringent. Her insights are lacerating, her approach sly, her visions searing, her wit honed, and her imagination peripatetic and larcenous, feasting on art, myth, fairy tales, and science. While her novels, including the brilliant
A Whistling Woman (2002) and the Booker Prize-winning
Possession (1990)
, are complex and powerful,
her short stories are dazzling concentrates. As in her earlier collections,
The Matisse Stories (1995),
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1997), and
Elementals (1999), Byatt creates, in her newest set of gems, a palimpsest of art and life as she examines how each shapes the other, and how trauma, be it personal or the mass psychosis of war, irrevocably transforms personalities and lives. In several galvanizing and highly original tales, including "Body Art," in which a gynecologist reluctantly gets involved with an angry young artist, she postulates deeply intriguing conflicts over the sacredness and profanity of the body and the vulnerability of the mind. And once again, Byatt proves herself to be the queen of fractured fairy tales. In "The Thing in the Woods," two young girls evacuated from London at the start of World War II see something loathsome in the forest, a grotesque embodiment of evil, while "A Stone Woman" stands as a gloriously beautiful evocation of grief and metamorphosis.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.