The Biographer's Tale - Rilegato

"Phineas G. Nanson decides to write a biography of the noted biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, believing biography to be the ultimate art of factual arrangement and Destry-Scholes to be the ultimate biographer. . . . [He] finds little material on Destry-Scholes himself and a plethora on Destry-Scholes' many interests. . . . [The Biographer's Tale] is all written in Victorian narrative style, and it's all fascinating. . . . We wonder what is happening to poor Phineas, lost in research and out of a job. We feel his frustration as he follows one research trail after another to a dead end. . . . When the book returns to the life of Phineas, present-day London, the writing is spare and comic. Characters emerge, brilliantly dawn and alive on the page."
–-Joanna Rose, The Oregonian

"With The Biographer's Tale A.S. Byatt embarks the reader on a wild ride-part sleuth tale, part academic parody a la Borges, part Victorian chronicle. . . . The constant back-and-forth . . . proceeds flawlessly, and the story is not devoid of plot twists, which infuse energy into the narrative. As for Byatt's prose, it is at once powerful and poetic. Byatt's sentences reverberate like great music. . . . Not just a novelist, she's also an erudite writer who keeps her readers on their intellectual toes with historical, literary, philosophical, scientific and historical references on virtually every page. . . . A feast for the brain . . . an impressive achievement, a literary mosaic at once exotic, academic, esoteric, engaging, and disconcerting." –-Jean Charbonneau, Denver Post

"Wise, sharp-witted . . . [A..S. Byatt] rarely misses a chance to build authority and authenticity. . . . As in her Booker Prize-winner, "Possession" (1990), some of her people are sniffy, self-important academics. But, again following "Possession," these unpleasant bookworms generate some exciting, provocative scenes. . . . It offers many gems along with enough intellectual depth to please the over-educated. Miss it at your peril." –-Peter Wolfe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Phineas G. Nanson is an unlikely hero, but the perfect protagonist-narrator for A.S. Byatt's comic tale . . . Not surprisingly, Nanson's research . . . evolves, by intricately layered turns, into . . . another delicious A.S. Byatt novel. . . . [The Biographer's Tale] drips with equal measures of learning and wit, and, I might add, not a little satire about the ways that high theory deadens literary practice, and how competing notions about what constitutes a legitimate "biography" make seeing a life, any life, both steady and whole nearly impossible. . . . Savvy readers will watch in something approaching amazement as Byatt weaves seemingly disparate stories . . . into the (nearly) unified tale . . . . It is, as they used to say about British novels of an earlier age, a rattling good tale, at the same time that it is about the peculiar mix of detective work and personal involvement that goes into the making of biography." –Sanford Pinsker, Providence Sunday Journal

A. S. Byatt's novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990) and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.