Byatt in June 2007 in Lyon, France.
24 August 1936
Sheffield, England
Setecientas páginas que se me hicieron cortas. Es cierto que uno se pierde entre tantos personajes y ha de hacer un esfuerzo (incluso con papel y lápiz) para mantener el control de todos ellos, pero ello contribuye a crear un ambiente rico, complejo y creíble. Me gustaron los caracteres de los personajes, el ambiente que se crea entre ellos, las historias, tanto las públicas como las oscuras y ocultas que van emergiendo durante la narración. Y al final darte cuenta de la alegoría (por lo menos así lo interpreté yo) de que todo ese mundo creado con cuidado y tejido escrupulosamente, todas esas ilusiones, amores, rencillas, todos los éxitos y todos los fracasos, el esfuerzo invertido, los sueños, los planes, todas las historias y toda la historia converge en un punto final que los destruye a todos ellos, que no sirven para nada, como si no hubieran ocurrido, como si el libro no hubiera sido escrito, la gran destructora de todo: la guerra.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Book (2015-02-02)
The Children's Book is a 2009 novel by British writer A.S. Byatt. It follows the adventures of several inter-related families, adults and children, from 1895 through World War I. Loosely based upon the life of children's writer E. Nesbit [1] there are secrets slowly revealed that show that the families are much more creatively formed than first guessed. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.[1]
The Norris family (Olive, Humphrey, Olive's sister Violet, and many children) are Fabians, living in a world of artists, writers, craftsman, all moving into new ways to express art, and living an artful life, before the horrors and loss of the Great War. While the central character of Olive is a writer of children's literature, supporting her large family with her writing, the title of the book refers to the children in the book: Tom, Julian, Philip, Elsie, Dorothy, Hedda, Griselda, Florence, Charles/Karl, Phyllis and others, following each as they approach adulthood and the terrors of war.[2]
Olive Wellwood, the beloved author at the center of “The Children’s Book,” is Byatt’s kind of tale-teller, an expert in traditional English fairy stories whose own versions come with a dark Germanic twist. A child of the South Yorkshire coal mines who has written her way to fame and respectability amid the cultural ferment of the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, Olive lives in a cottage in Kent called Todefright with her husband, Humphry, and their seven children. There is Fabian socialism at the breakfast table, William Morris furniture in the parlor and an elaborate Midsummer theatrical on the lawn each June. To a visiting magazine writer, Olive is a “modern Mother Goose,” sitting by the fire in a velvet gown as children listen raptly to her stories about neglectful mothers and ratlike creatures who snatch babies’ shadows in the crib before retreating to the underground world.
But to Byatt, Olive is less a paragon of fairy-godmotherhood than an ambiguously empowered New Woman and a conflicted sage for an era when the entire culture had reverted to a kind of childishness. As dour Queen Victoria, who died in 1901, gave way to carefree King Edward “the Caresser,” Byatt writes, “people talked, and thought, earnestly and frivolously, about sex,” while showing “a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood, to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children.”
The novel begins in 1895 in the tunnels underneath the South Kensington Museum, where a young working-class runaway is found by Olive’s oldest son bunking down in a medieval crypt, and taken to live first with the Wellwoods and then with Benedict Fludd, a visionary ceramist who flies into mad, pot-smashing rages while his wife and daughters wander around the house like zombie princesses in a Pre-Raphaelite horror movie. It ends two decades and a staggering number of plot developments later in the trenches of the Somme. In between, Byatt tracks the overlapping fortunes of the Wellwoods, the Fludds and several other households joined by an ardent belief in art and social reform, not to mention quasi-incestuous escapades that would make Bloomsbury blush. “No child, it is said, has the same parents as any other,” Byatt writes — an aside that, with this crowd, is less a gloss on birth order and family dynamics than a simple genealogical truth. Byatt explores the way adults try to define, preserve, celebrate and prolong childhood, even as they fail to see how their own children strain against the plot lines dreamed up for them. Surveying the magical kingdom of Todefright, Olive “could not, and did not, imagine any of the inhabitants of this walled garden wanting to leave it, or change it, though her stories knew better.”
Byatt herself is a prodigious, even compulsive, conjurer of worlds within worlds, and “The Children’s Book” bulges with descriptions of puppet shows, stage plays, art exhibitions and craft camps, as well as plenty of canny literary pastiche that will be familiar to readers of “Possession” and other previous Byatt works. We glimpse the premiere of J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” (“Cardboard,” Olive’s Peter Pan-like son Tom mutters. “He doesn’t know anything about boys, or making things up”), and of Olive’s own triumphant play for unchildish adults, hailed for its echoes of Wagner and Kleist. There is a long side trip to the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the Wellwoods marvel at Edward Burne-Jones’s painting of Lancelot’s dream along with the Hall of Dynamos and displays of “fairy electricity.” The characters are constantly receiving news of the German socialists, rushing to lectures on the Woman Question or debating Bimetallism, the Boer War and the merits of various pottery glazes. (Especially the pottery glazes.) There are cameos by Rupert Brooke, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw and the broken-down Oscar Wilde (to name only a few), that last encountered in Rodin’s pavilion at the exposition. (“He smelled horrible,” Humphry tells Olive. “His mouth itself is a Gate of Hell.”)
While Byatt’s engagement with the
period’s overlapping circles of artists and reformers is serious and
deep, so much is stuffed into “The Children’s Book” that it can be hard
to see the magic forest for all the historical lumber — let alone the
light at the end of the narrative tunnel. The action is sometimes cut
off at awkward moments by ponderous newsreel-style voice-over or potted
lectures in cultural history. Startling revelations are dropped in
almost nonchalantly and not picked up again until dozens or even
hundreds of pages later. Byatt’s coda on the Great War, dispatched in
scarcely more pages than the Exposition Universelle, is devastating in
its restraint. But too often readers may feel as if they’re marooned in
the back galleries of a museum with a frighteningly energetic docent.
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Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt (/ˈbaɪ.ət/ BY-ət;[1] born 24 August 1936), is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.[2]
Byatt was born in Sheffield as Antonia Susan Drabble, the eldest child of John Drabble, QC, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning.[3] Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard Drabble QC is a barrister.[4] The family moved to York as a result of the bombing of Sheffield during the Second World War.
Byatt's upbringing was fairly unhappy as she struggled against her domineering mother. She was educated at two independent boarding schools, Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School in York. She noted in an interview in 2009 "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful – you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things."[3] She did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends. She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford.[5] Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962–71),[6] the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.[6]
She married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and had a daughter, as well as a son who was killed in a car accident at the age of 11. The marriage was dissolved in 1969. She has two daughters with her second husband Peter John Duffy.[3]
Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble has sometimes been strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship is no longer especially close and they don't read each other's books, Drabble describes the situation as "normal sibling rivalry"[7] and Byatt says it has been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line."[8]
The story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, Byatt's first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was published in 1964. Her novel The Game (1967) charts the dynamics between two sisters,[6] and the family theme is continued in her quartet The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002), Still Life winning the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1989.[6] Her quartet of novels is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love. Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young female intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcée with a young son making a new life in London. Byatt says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity [...] I had this image of coming out from under and seeing the light for a bit and then being shut in a kitchen, which I think happened to women of my generation."[3] Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s. She describes herself as "a naturally pessimistic animal": "I don't believe that human beings are basically good, so I think all utopian movements are doomed to fail, but I am interested in them."[3]
She has written critical studies of Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and a significant influence on her own writing. In those books and other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature.[6] She conceives of fantasy as an alternative to, rather than an escape from, everyday life, and it is often difficult to tell when the fantastic in her work actually represents the eruption of psychosis. "In my work", she notes "writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers."[3] Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are researching. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1990 and was made into a film in 2002. Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia (1992) was turned into a successful film, Angels & Insects (1995), nominated for an Academy Award. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize[6] and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Also known for her short stories, Byatt has been influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy. Her story collections include Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), a collection of fairy tales; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998); and Little Black Book of Stories (2003). The Matisse Stories, (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by Henri Matisse, each the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists’ lives. Her books reflect a continuous interest in zoology, entomology, geology,[9] and Darwinism among other repeated themes. Byatt has written for media including the British journal Prospect, The Guardian, The Times and the Times Literary Supplement.[6] She has been a judge on many literary award panels including the Hawthornden Prize, the Booker, David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Betty Trask Award.
On the role of writing in her life, she says: "I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously – but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people."[3]
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| A. S. Byatt | |
|---|---|
|
Byatt in June 2007 in Lyon, France.
|
|
| Born | Antonia Susan Drabble 24 August 1936 Sheffield, England |
| Occupation | Writer, poet |
| Nationality | English |
| Period | 1964 – present |
| Notable awards | Man Booker Prize |
| Website | |
| www | |