The Biographer's Tale

by A.S. Byatt

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes this erotic, playful, and provocative novel about the collision of art and truth.

Phineas G. Nanson, a disillusioned post-graduate student, decides to leave his abstract studies and pursue a seemingly concrete task: to write a biography of a great biographer. But Phineas quickly discovers that facts can be unreliable and a “whole life” hard to define. As he tracks his subject from Africa to the Arctic, he comes to rely on two women–one of whom may be the guide he needs out of his research and back into his own life. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire, The Biographer’s Tale is a provocative look at “truth” in biography and our perennial quest for certainty.

Genres: Fiction, Books About Books, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, Contemporary

305 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2000

About the author

A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale 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 her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;

Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor

Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.

Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.

Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.

Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999

Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;

Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little

Reviews

[Marina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the tale of a would-be-biographer’s research for the purpose of writing an account of the life of another biographer, an obscure and forgotten figure in the novel’s world of letters.

If I were to use only one word to describe this novel it would be erudite. A S Byatt is remarkably adept at showing off her extensive knowledge and enticing the reader into wanting more. But here, this doesn’t quite seem to be the case, all of the time. Our hero has to sift through his subject’s writings which are set out for us in their totality and I have to admit that for me at least, these sections of the book veered from mildly interesting to excruciatingly boring. In fact at one point I was ready to abandon the book as full of erudition with little substance behind it. Instead of that, I started noting down the themes I thought Byatt was pursuing, such as an exploration of life as opposed to death, decay and absence of consciousness, of individual consciousness and decision making as opposed to being part of a collective. And that’s when my reading experience became quite enjoyable.

In fact I will happily forgive the writer some dull reading in return for an introduction to some enchanting characters like the travel agents whose aim was to sell ‘odd holidays: literary holidays - the golden road to Samarkand, haunts of the Lorelei, Treasure Islands, Brontes' Brussels’.

[Cecily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Story of a graduate student of lit crit who gives it up for the more concrete pursuit of facts, by writing the ultimate biography of a biographer. So layers of fictional biography, and lengthy and detailed diversions into the diverse interests of the original subject.

The narrator is a man (admittedly of ambiguous sexuality to others), but it reads more like a woman telling the story, though I can't put my finger on why.

When I read this way back in 2005, I found it “All very disjointed and annoying.” I hope that would be less true now (2017, after reading a couple of other Byatt novels with similar themes and structure).

Byatt and Biography in General

Byatt is a novelist who loves the academic approach to biography, applied to fiction and semi-fiction. This passion is reflected in all four of her novels I’ve now read, with varying degrees of success. (I’ve also read some short stories.)

The Children's Book, 4*. See my review HERE.
Possession, 3*. See my review HERE.
The Biographer’s Tale, 2*. This book.
Even her myth-based Ragnarok, 4*, is related, as it's interwoven with the life of a child who is largely her. See my review HERE.

[Lizzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

So this is a story told by an academic who decides to quit that and pursue concrete things. He decides to write a biography of a great biographer, known for his writings about a British adventurer. He obtains a number of essays written by the biographer, presented to us by Byatt, as she did with the poetry in Possession. They're puzzling - they describe playwright Henrik Ibsen, naturalist Carl Linnaeas, and scientist Francis Galton. All very well. But if they're intended to be biographical, they contain a number of falsehoods. By this time he's met a Swedish ecologist who helps him with translations and points out some of the errors. He then makes contact with the niece of the biographer, who provides him with index cards and photographs left by him. They're equally obscure.

All of this is interesting: what was the biographer planning to do with this material? what are the connections between the three subjects? All of them are about journeys, magic, transformation, illusion.

But that's where the book leaves us. The narrator becomes romantically involved with both of the women, gets a job that brings him joy (and a terrible misunderstanding), and then that's how it ends. None of the mysteries are revealed, and even the details about his life aren't clear: Do the two women know of each other, and approve his involvement with both?

He finds happiness and joy in concrete things, in nature, in the here and now. Maybe that's all we're supposed to take from it. But I was terribly unsatisfied.

May I just say that I’m annoyed by novels that have title that include the words "A Novel". The word "tale" in the title of this one should tip us off that this isn’t a work of nonfiction, in case there's any reason to doubt.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s been decades since I read an A.S. Byatt book. I was enamored by her writing in the late 90s, and somehow stopped reading her work. This book reminded me why I do like her writing, and why I don’t as well.

The narrator, Phineas G. Nanues, is a young literary fellow who decided to give up literary criticism as he sees no point in it. Instead he wants to interact with things.

A professor, who then becomes his new advisor, gives him a three-volume biography of Sir Edmund Bole written by Scholes Destry-Scholes. Phineas is enthralled and decides that he will do a biography of Destry-Scholes. He also needs to get a job, and finds himself working for a unique travel agency.

This book is his record of this transition and his searching, and of his life. Destry-Scholes is not an easy man to find, although Phineas is a very good researcher he is unable to come up with information. Slowly, a few pieces come to him and he finds that perhaps Destry-Scholes was working on a biography of some sort of three different men. These papers and findings are included verbatim in the book. This is where sometimes it gets a bit tedious and reminds me why I don’t like Byatt. Too much in the weeds!

As Phineas is writing he says he hates autobiographies, he is not going to write one, yet his record does indeed become that. There are layers in Byatt’s writing. Sometimes I feel not adept enough to catch everything. The layers in just the title and the biography here is a bit obvious, that helps.

I have several more of her books still waiting to be read, and will get to them sometime, hopefully before decades pass.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Maelstrom: how evocative that name is, the Charybdis that tempts you, the whirlpool that draws you down into its watery depths, a volatile spiral maze from which there is no escape. The Maelstrom, or Moskstraumen as the Norwegian original should really be called, features only sporadically in The Biographer’s Tale but its symbolism permeates the whole novel.

In The Biographer’s Tale we have A S Byatt, critic, novelist and onetime academic writing in the first person as Phineas G Nanson. We learn that Nanson, a postgraduate disillusioned with critical theory, is introduced to a biography of Victorian explorer Sir Elmer Bole, author of nearly a dozen texts and a real-life Gahmuret, siring children in Europe and the Middle East. Nanson then becomes obsessed with Bole’s elusive biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, eventually discovering that Destry-Scholes may, in chasing up notes on Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen, have been drawn to his death by the allure of the Maelstrom. Destry-Scholes’ notes and his few relics that the young scholar examines seem to throw doubt not only on what is true and what is fiction but also on whether any single biography is capable of delineating the whole of a subject’s life, works and thoughts. Circles within circles then, but, like the spirals of a whirlpool, all connected in seamless seething turmoil. Hanging over the whole are the questions, who exactly is the biographer – Byatt, Nanson, Bole or Destry-Scholes – and is it the biographer who’s telling the tale or is the tale about the biographer?

I very much enjoyed this erudite yet entertaining fiction: it combined a love of cataloguing, pigeonholing and cryptic puzzles with a snapshot of a gauche young man who, through questing for a particular grail, manages to find some equanimity. It’s not a perfect novel – as critics note, the erudition and the entertainment don’t quite gel a lot of the time – but it certainly gives pause for thought. With its sifting through fact and fiction in the lives of three great cataloguers of minutiae – taxonomer Linnaeus, anthropologist Galton and playwright Ibsen – it becomes evident that, failing a Library of Babel, it is never possible to find out everything about even the small things of life. If it seems that Byatt, through her puppet Nanson, avoids getting to the roots of these conundrums by concluding with Phineas Nanson settling down to a modus vivendi with his complex relationships (the blonde ecologist Fulla Biefeld, the dark-haired Vera Destry-Scholes and the esoteric travel-agents Christophe and Erik), then perhaps that is her message: human relationships matter more than dry fact-filing, however diverting.

Still, shuffling around those cataloguing cards is great fun. Take Phineas Nanson, for example. ‘Phineas’ may remind us of that fictional explorer, Phileas Fogg, who travelled around the world in eighty days; Phineas is also a Thracian prophet who helped Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Phineus’ middle name, Gilbert, may or may not derive from the great English naturalist Gilbert White, himself concerned with the great chain of being. In addition, Byatt tells us that Phineas discovers that “nanus was the Latin for dwarf, cognate with the French nain,” and notes with a frisson that he himself is “a little person, the child of a little person” and that he has a name in a system, Nanson, suggesting that his role as potential biographer renders him of small significance. Of course, there is more to this than Byatt explicitly tells us. Later on, someone mistakenly credits him with the name of the great Norwegian explorer Nansen. The postgraduate scholar willy-nilly finds that nominative determinism has predestined him to be questing, classifying and exploring.

However, a large clue comes from Byatt’s own acknowledgements at the end of the novel. Thanking an entomologist for specialist help, she notes particularly an insect with a suggestive name, Phaeogenes nanus, that reminds us of Phineas’ own name. It may not surprise the reader that this insect is a parasitic wasp, and perhaps gives us an inkling of the role of biographers in the lives of real people. Into such depths does the literary maelstrom deliver us.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entering a novel by A.S. Byatt is like going to a party of very smart people. The initial thrill of mingling with such brilliance is tempered by the nagging sens e of one's relative stupidity.

You know you're in trouble when a book opens with a quote from Empedocles and a reference to Lacan's theory of morcellement.

"The Biographer's Tale," a wildly inventive, over-demanding novel, reads like a parody of all things intellectual, Byatt included.

The narrator is a comically self-conscious graduate student disgusted with the emptiness of modern literary theory, particularly the implications of post-structuralism, which incinerate everything under the laser of deconstruction. After a few years of this pointlessness, he despairs, "I felt an urgent need for a life full of things. Full of facts."

In desperation, Phineas Gilbert Nanson (his last name is Latin for dwarf) turns to his advisor, a specialist in the field of place names, who recommends he take refuge in the solidity of biography. "The art of biography is a despised art because it is an art of things, of facts, of arranged facts," the professor tells his naive student.

Taking this recommendation to heart, Phineas plunges into research for a biography about Scholes Destry-Scholes, a forgotten mid-20th-century biographer of Elmer Bole, a 19th-century biographer of Evliya Chelebi, the 17th-century Turkish traveler. Have you got that?

In the first 20 pages, Byatt nests lives within lives, reflections bounce off reflections, and allusions lead to references that echo antecedents. It's all very witty, absurd, and intimidating. This is a novel that cries out for a scaffolding of explanatory footnotes that would, unfortunately, dampen its witty satire.

In Destry-Scholes's three volume biography, Phineas finds the terra firma he's been craving, a scholar who "recounts Elmer Bole's personal life exactly as far as it can be known and no further." Writing "before the idea of 'objectivity' was deconstructed," Destry-Scholes concerns himself with the facts, the details, the real things. (For modern literary theorists, such claims inspire howls of erudite laughter. In French.)

His early efforts produce almost nothing about this obscure subject, but eventually he secures a collection of jumbled papers written by Destry-Scholes. They appear to be notes for three different biographies in progress: Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-century taxonomist; Francis Galton, a 19th-century eugenicist; and Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright.

One way to convey the difficulty of making sense of these notes would be to tell us about the difficulty of making sense of these notes. The other way would be to make us read these notes. Byatt chooses this second method, and the experience is alternately maddening, boring, fascinating, and wholly realistic. She pushes the limits of what a novel can be, forcing us to endure an experience rather than receive her story.

As Phineas investigates further, hairline cracks appear in his subject's noble objectivity. It seems Linnaeus invented one of his brave adventures, and (gasp!) Destry-Scholes may have purposely embellished this fiction further. Why? Isn't it possible, Phineas cries, to write about something without coloring it with your own perspective?

He protests (too much) that "the last thing I have any interest in writing - I mean this - is an autobiography. No, no, the true literary fanatic, the primeval reader, is looking for anything but a mirror."

But as his research leads him further into the chaotic minutiae of Destry-Scholes's life, he's clearly lost in the funhouse. Soon, he's referring to himself as "the ur-I of this document" and noticing that "no string has an end. Like spider-silk unreeling."

Struggling to reclaim something real, he takes a job at Puck's Girdle, a travel agency that arranges obscure trips for the literary minded, "the golden road to Samarkand, haunts of the Lorelei, Treasure Island, Brontes' Brussels."

He also begins two passionate affairs, one with a bee taxonomist and another with an anesthesiologist obsessed with cataloging Destry-Scholes's collection of marbles.

Ordering - that basic human need to organize the world despite the impossibility of reaching anything beyond arbitrary systems - runs throughout all these characters' lives, living or dead. But for this hapless biographer, the pursuit leads only to further chaos, moral and intellectual.

What's most brilliant about this novel is also what's most inaccessible about it, an irony that will delight a few hundred post-structuralists, but may not please the wider audience this Booker Prize-winner is sure to draw.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0201/p1...

[Quandong · Rating 1 out of 5]

Normally, I am A.S. Byatt's bitch. But I couldn't get into this book, I couldn't even get past the first 50 pages. I'd love to hear if anyone finished this and thinks I am missing something.

[Susannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complex read about the journeys one disillusioned academic must take that lead to unexpected discoveries about himself and things he thought he knew. As always, Byatt never disappoints; her own diligently investigated topical research is woven into the backstory with a fine hand, and her ability to make odd characters engaging with a delightful resonance left me smiling happily at the end of this book.

[Sunhawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like my colleague Quandong, I am normally Byatt's bitch, but I too bogged down the first time I tried to read this book. Most of the goodreads reviewers that didn't like it appear to be expecting a typically yummy Byatt book like Possession. Me too, until I recalibrated my expectations ... and then I found the book to be delicious.
Byatt is a writer's writer, and that's what this book is about: a dedicated and wildly successful *academic* writer writing about a writer who is trying to write a biography. That is a strange loop! It scarcely matters, but enlivens the tale, that the object of the novel's writer (let's call him PGN) is slippery and difficult. What really matters is that our author, ASB, in addition to being a successful author and an academic, is also a critic, whose working life bridges two eras of academic criticism, from close textual analysis (meaning: paying attention to the way an author chooses to put words together in the context of her or his life experience) to "postmodernist literary theory" (whatever the hell that is, but something that Ms Byatt understands better than I do, and doesn't seem to care for much.)
Many of us elders find ourselves bridging similar gulphs: in this book, we see the centuries-old Linnaean taxa system -- Genus species, example Homo diurnis -- being supplanted by DNA barcoding, leaving generations of taxonomists gasping over their superannuated expertise. Grammarians complain about the mild violence of politically correct pronoun mis-use, but get used to it: "they" can be singular. Life evolves.
Telling The Biographer's Tale buys ASB the right to test the validity of postmodernism's theories using PGN's voice, developing from a postgraduate dweeb unhappily mouthing his discipline's current catchphrases into a character who begins to recognize that he loves to write. His foils (or should I say scabbards?) Fulla and Vera give us just enough honey to keep the story bubbling despite the heavy doses of "biographical material" that bogged me down on my first try.
This isn't an easy book to digest, but Quandong, I think you did miss something, and should give Tale another try. Don't feel bad, readers, if this book mystified you. Kirkus got it wrong, too, concluding "Not for Oprah's Book Club--but readers willing to be lectured will be suitably rewarded." No, Kirkus, not lectured, but *shown* in the best old-style tradition of "show, don't tell." This is a worthy book, and thank you, ASB, for writing it.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A.S. Byatt’s THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE, is a mystery reminiscent of POSSESSION, although much more abstract and intellectualized. In the novel, graduate student Phineas G. Nanson drops his work in literary theory to pursue the “real,” embodied in his attempt to write a biography of biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes.

Information about Scholes Destry-Scholes, however, is elusive and cryptic, and Nanson can only come up with clues. He eventually stumbles across a stack of index cards and a bag of marbles left by Destry-Scholes, and with the help of their current owner, he organizes the index cards into broad categories and vainly attempts to gain additional insight by establishing a marble taxonomy.

While Nanson may be obsessed with his subject, Destry-Scholes is in turn obsessed with Linnaeus, Ibsen, and the hitherto-unknown-to-me Sir Francis Galton, Victorian polymath and pioneer in eugenics. As it turns out, Linnaeus, for instance, embroidered various facts of his life, and Destry-Scholes embroiders them even further, thus raising the question of who is reliable and what is in fact “real.”

THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE is more about Nanson’s (and Byatt’s) own intellectual life than it is about the putative Destry-Scholes. At the same time it is an involved and highly allusive joke, and Byatt is having us on, while challenging our intellectual resourcefulness.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must confess that I rarely read a modern book that is so unashamedly intellectual as this one, one of the most demanding reads that ever came under my eyes. It is bewildering, complex, assuming that you, the reader, are as smart as Byatt and are able to follow her… or is it ? Because this most curious book reminded me also of A Confederacy of Dunces from John Kennedy Toole, as both protagonists are curiously unadepted for this world, but don’t seem to realise it…it is the world they seem to see as unadapted to them.
The book is a mix of high flying pensées and the very down-to-earth circumstances in which the main figure, Phineag G. Sanson lives. Some critics read it as a critical look about the impossibility and problems of biographies, but I really read it more as the story of Phineas, the man who tries to become the biographer of a biographer. The way he throws his intellectualisms (is that a word?) around is stunning and demanding for the reader, but in other scenes the book speaks about his job in an excentric travel agency, and even about his sexual adventures with two young ladies, both as curious as Phineas himself, and these scenes are funny and intriguing.
This is one of the strangest books I read since a long time, and in the beginning I was really tempted to put it away. After a while it took me and I finished it with relish but also with effort. I quite liked it but would I advise it to somebody else ? I don’t know.
It is funny, it is interesting, it is sometimes extremely boring, it is pedantic (or is only Phineas pedantic, and not the book), and strangely enough it reminds me of a fellow history-student who was just like him, even including the oddness of his successes with the other sexes where he seemed to be very succesful (at least in my eyes). He moved to Italy with a beautiful Italian girlfriend and I since lost track of him, but I loved talking to him, one of the few people with whom I could have unashamedly intellectual conversations, talking about literature and art with somebody who actually undrstood what he was talking about, and at he same time was full of the good things in life (food, wine and girls…).

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a few of Byatt's books, and have been thinking about how to summarize my experience with them. She seems concerned with intellectual people (I think of all her characters having an I in their Mayer-Briggs classification) who, though some sort of academic or research-related journey, make strides in their romantic, sexual and emotional lives. The interesting thing is the weird, dark undercurrents that seem to go along with this journey. Usually it seems like the protagonist's journey to sexual completeness (or whatever) ends up being all sweetness and light and healthy, well-expressed sexuality, but the character seems to have some doubts and fear of darkness along the way.

So, I like that Byatt is unafraid to write about nerdy, not particularly good looking, people who fall in love. Us mediocre-lookin' geeks need some representation in the literature. She writes well about the insecurity and gratitude and eventual move to self-confidence in people with little sexual experience. On the downside, I was pretty confused by the message of the romantic portion of this story - if a sexually liberated Phineas loves two different women equally and wants to divide his life between them....okay? Except that the women seem unaware of this. Perhaps I'm sensitive about this, but keeping women uninformed in order to fulfill your own needs? This does not smack of respect or feminism to me.

Anyway, besides the (to me, problematic) romance, I found the theme on the back of the book ("How can you ever know what's true?") sort of vaguely fleshed out at best. There's not a lot of the main character trying and failing to follow clues about his subject, just a lot of him not trying, for financial or practical reasons. I think I would have liked this better if it had been more of an expensive, mad quest - Phineas somehow scraping the funds together to follow Destry-Scholes' footsteps, only to come up empty.

So the best part about the book, for me, was Destry-Scholes' notes on Bond (who is fictious?), Ibsen, Galton and (most interesting to me) Linnaeus. Also, if you're more up on your post-modern literary theory than I am, and have been a PhD student in English, you'll probably find a lot of in-jokes. But my overall feeling is: This is about a nerd (who comes off effeminate to strangers) who seems to find fulfillment by *becoming closer to our culture's masculine ideal*. Maybe there's a smart comment here that cultural expectations are not *entirely* inherently wrong-headed, simplfying and offensive, and that they, like cliches, contain a grain of wisdom. But I don't think so.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I confess upfront that I like classical novels. Stories that follow a progressive storyline that isn't opaque and that involves the reader in the emotional life of the character. I appreciated the humor of a grad student (having been one) becoming fed up with the nonsense of deconstructionism (I agree) and trying to make a life as a biographer's biographer. Very meta. Still, the story feels like it's trying to be too erudite, too sophisticated. It's hard to feel for the narrator.

There will be some spoilers after this, so be warned.

Byatt is quite adept at some aspects of writing from a male voice. The opportunistic aspect of sexual liaisons is funny, but also serious and one of the less appealing aspects of the novel. The interesting characters, such as Erik and Christophe, are only in the story to the point of wondering about their lives, and then dropped as a solipsistic Phineas G. Nanson finds his way into two women's beds, while not really loving either of them. It's difficult to identify with such a man. Having written novels (unpublished) myself, I know that the protagonist who doesn't know what he wants is a tough sell. Phineas is even more difficult in that he takes advantage of those who have the capacity for being true lovers. It is strange to find a story by a female author that presents an opportunistic lover so casually. Maybe that's the point.

The story is naturalistic until, very near the end, when a faun appears. Many pages of disjointed note cards from Linnaeus, Galton, and Ibsen are probably capable of being arranged into a meaningful puzzle by those who have the time to study the novel in (ironically) and English department class, but for the casual reader they are tedious and don't really add much to the novel. Then to put photos of two of them dead into the text is a somewhat sobering experience for a witty novel.

I admit the fault may be entirely my own, but I didn't know where this novel was going. I didn't care for the protagonist, and I closed the back cover with a shrug. Others, however, may find it captivating.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 2 out of 5]

While reading this book I became quite confused after a while as to whether this was meant as a full-length biography or a work of fiction. A.S.Byatt, indeed, is worth much more, much more than this confusing hodge-podge of literary detection and immaculate research. One-fourth into the novel I had given this up for good, and halfway through there was hardly any interest left and I left it like that, stalled for the while. I gave it another go this year and the results were no more different. But I finished it nevertheless.

Byatt, with all the research and intellectuality that characterises her work, could have done better than write about a disillusioned literary student who decides to write a biography on a great biographer, and in the process accumulates the biographer's work on three famous individuals-playwright Henrik Ibsen, naturalist Carolus Linnaeas, and scientist Francis Galton. Indeed 90% of the novel consists of essays of the biographer on these three, all placed together disjointedly and pointlessly. In the process he befriends a Swedish ecologist, and gets trapped in the lure of eros in the form of the biographer's niece. From her he acquires his index cards and photographs which again, like the essays, are placed without any semblance of direction. They are obscure and pointless, as is the story. In fact, there is hardly any story left towards the end, where the resolution is inconclusive.

Two stars, and only for the immaculate biographical content and research work that characterises A.S.Byatt. This would have been better served as a literary biography.

[Melanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a recovering post-sturcturalist who is quite glad that grad school is well and truly done with, I loved the premise of this book: Phineas G. Nanson ups and quits his graduate degree and critical theory seminars to write a biography of a biographer. In theory, I admire the elegance of a composite novel about a man researching a biographer who was working on a composite biography of three men who were obsessed in some way with the idea of the composite. In practice, I got bogged down by all of the source material that Nanson-the-narrator included (and this comes from someone who read every last line of the poetry included in _Possession_), and the digression about the Strange Customer was just plain odd.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seeing that this was a blend of history and present-day narrative, I expected/hoped for another 'Possession'. It isn't - but maybe I shouldn't have expected that, as a writer like AS Byatt isn't likely to write the same book twice! I did enjoy it, all the same, although some of the long sections with little bits of the main character's research, as he aims to write a biography of the ultimate biographer, can be heavy going.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very literary and a bit over my head. I enjoyed A.S. Byatt's novel Possession, but this one I had a difficult time following. She's a very intelligent writer, which I appreciate, but sometimes it's a bit much. Still interesting, though!

[Rambling Raconteur · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://youtu.be/q_SsD6UKGp4

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a doubtless slightly unfortunate tendency to compare all A.S. Byatt novels to "Possession", but "A Biographer's Tale" makes such comparisons almost inevitable. It is, in a way, a mirror-image, or possibly bizarro-world version, of "Possession". Both novels have as their hero a young academic studying an unfashionable branch of literature; both feature a quest to solve a (fictional) literary mystery; both have a heavy Victorian influence; both involve the interpolation of excerpts from invented works by invented authors (a Byatt specialty, and something that she does about as well as anybody this side of Borges), though the excerpts from never-completed biographies that feature in "A Biographer's Tale" are probably less likely to be skipped over by the average reader than the poetry that features heavily in "Possession"; and both have an exceedingly academic-literary atmosphere (it's possible to read and enjoy "A Biographer's Tale" even if you've never heard of Foucault or have no real idea of what post-structuralism is, but a passing familiarity with literary theory certainly doesn't hurt). But otherwise, everything in "A Biographer's Tale" happens in exactly the opposite way as it does in "Possession". In "Possession", the solution of the central problem leads the hero to academic respect and a job; in "A Biographer's Tale", not only is the central problem never solved, by the end the hero has not just abandoned any idea of studying literature, but in a way the idea of literature itself, with the end of the novel arriving at the point where he decides he is no longer interested in writing.

In fact, and rather unusually for a work of literature, "A Biographer's Tale" can be read as a rejection of literature in favor of science. The book opens with Phineas Nanson, the main character, deciding that he is no longer interested in literary theory (many of the references to it scattered through the book are derogatory), but instead wants to learn about "things" and "facts". This leads him to biography, in particular the fictional Scholes Destry-Scholes' biography of an invented Victorian polymath, Sir Elmer Bole, loosely based on Richard Francis Burton. Inspired by this work, Phineas decides to write a biographical study of Destry-Scholes, and the rest of the book describes, more or less, his attempt to learn about Destry-Scholes, an attempt which, not to spoil the book too much, is a total failure. In fact, the title itself is really quite misleading: the book is not the story of Destry-Scholes, who we never really learn much about, and Phineas himself is certainly not the title biographer, as long before the end he has abandoned his initial project. Instead, he is drawn towards science, partly by investigating Destry-Scholes' notes for projects on Linnaeus, Ibsen, and Francis Galton, and partly through the women he meets: Vera Alphage, Destry-Scholes' niece, who is a radiologist, and Fulla Biefeld, a Swedish biologist who he meets at the Linnaean society. Fulla's attitude towards literary study is particularly caustic: to her, the importance of trying to analyze and reverse the impact of humanity on the environment, in particular on pollinators, her specialty, dwarfs that of any literary field. Her beliefs have a powerful affect on Phineas, who is largely unsure where his life will lead: given his desire to study "things", he is lead inevitably to the concreteness of science. At the end of the book, Phineas is in Turkey, helping Fulla engage in a study of pollination by beetles.

More broadly, though, "A Biographer's Tale" goes beyond the literature-science dichotomy to mount an attack on modern methods of gathering knowledge, of overspecialization and abstraction. Throughout the book, the models for knowing are not modern ivory-tower specialists but Renaissance men. Bole, the subject of Destry-Scholes biography, is (at the very least) a naturalist, linguist, art historian, historian, and geographer, in addition to writing translations, travelogues, novels, and poetry, and being an explorer and spy. Destry-Scholes himself becomes an expert in all these fields in the course of writing his biography, so that he can not just explain Bole's work but also elaborate on what he got right and wrong and why. Linnaeus's interests ranged beyond just classification, and Galton was another Victorian polymath (though remembered today solely for coming up with the idea of eugenics, Galton was also, among other things, a pioneering statistician and inventor of scientific meteorology): only Ibsen's place in the book's schema seems a little unclear. And the characters in the book itself are similarly broad. Fulla has wide-ranging scientific interests, and is never seen in a lab or office but is always out in the field getting her hands dirty, performing essential work that hardly anyone does any more. Meanwhile, Phineas finds employment at a specialty travel agency, "Puck's Girdle", that designs literary or historic or scientific or artistic tours and so requires a broad knowledge of many topics. Indeed, by the end of the book it's clear that Phineas is, deliberately or not, modeling his life after that of Bole: he describes himself as a "travel agent and parataxonomist". The dusty and sterile environment of the English department, with its dirty windows that you can't see out of that serve as an obvious metaphor (so obvious the book has to admit to it) for the insularity of academia, has been abandoned for a real world of concrete things to be studied and facts to be learned.

Regardless of how you feel about these issues (personally I think Byatt goes a little too far), the result is a rather strange book. We spend a lot of time investigating Destry-Scholes' investigations of Linnaeus, Galton, and Ibsen, without really ever getting anywhere. There are some parallels between the three, to be sure, but some of them are clearly introduced by Destry-Scholes himself -- the portions of his accounts of their lives that we read are partly fictional, including reports of visions that they never experienced -- and it's never quite clear why, or what those parallels are supposed to tell us about Destry-Scholes. This naturally raises some questions about Vera, who as his niece should presumably know something about, if not him, at least his family, which is, after all, also her family, but once raised these questions are just allowed to linger. And once it becomes clear that the central mystery of the book will not actually be resolved, a certain amount of tension is lost, which is presumably the reason for the introduction of the sub-plot involving Maurice Bossey. Something is needed to keep the story going and prevent it from degenerating into autobiography, as Phineas, who narrates, complains several times that it is doing. In the end, though, this sub-plot doesn't really go anywhere, and does nothing but put Phineas in a rather negative light. And the end of the book is slightly arbitrary: Phineas more or less just decides to stop writing about himself. There's not really a story to end, so the book just kind of peters out.

Prior to that, though, it is largely successful, in its own slightly dry, academic, and literary way (a tone that is largely set by Phineas's narration). Minor characters like Ormerod Osgood, the chair of the English department that Phineas is a member of as the novel starts, and Erik and Christophe, the gay couple who run Puck's Girdle, are excellent, eccentric enough to be interesting while still remaining just plausible. The bits and pieces of Destry-Scholes that we run across during the course of the book are quite well done, though I'm not sure if I would be up for his three-volume biography of Bole. And though Vera is perhaps a bit of a drip, Fulla has energy enough for both of them. Indeed, for the last quarter or so of the book she propels things forward almost single-handedly, without even the aid of a plot (in a way, she replaces the plot), and her forceful ecological arguments are among "A Biographer's Tale"'s most memorable passages. Thanks to Fulla, and to the book's ability to maintain coherence due to its consistency of tone, it never loses interest even as its story loses momentum.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never read anything by AS Byatt. I have heard of her... but I think I always assumed she was a bit too "literary" for my tastes, which in my head means snobby and convoluted kinda-real-life and not that interesting. I saw this book in a second hand book shop and thought - maybe I should give it a go; biography is an interesting topic and the blurb sounded a bit intriguing.

Plus, cool cover. 

Up to about the halfway point, I was utterly charmed. Besotted, even. Phineas Nanson (I was a bit disappointed when I discovered the narrator was a man; I'd forgotten that from the blurb) has decided to give up his study in postmodern literary theory, because it doesn't mean anything to him anymore. But that means he needs something new to study. A supervisor gives him three volumes of biography by Scholes Destry-Scholes; Nanson has an arrogant literary theorist aversion to biography. However, he is hooked by the charm of Destry-Scholes' writing, and proceeds to attempt a biography of the biographer. 

At this point, I thought there were going to be intriguing and possibly convoluted layers upon layers of biography. And there were: Nanson finds excerpts of other, possible, biographies written by Destry-Scholes but unpublished, and there are extended (and I mean a few dozen pages) included in the novel. These excerpts are a bit weird, and their subjects not immediately identified; there are certainly some themes that recur. 

Nanson goes on to research the subjects of these incomplete biographies, and of course finds himself in increasing levels of abstraction from his purported subject, the biographer. All of which is quite wonderful to read - including his finding a part-time job at a travel agency who specialise in odd, literary- or art- or otherwise abstrusely-themed holidays for discerning characters. 

It was all going so well.

(Spoilers from here, I guess? If you really want to give it a go yourself?)

And then it became a story of a man who ends up having a relationship with two different women at the same time. 

I mean, yes, there was discussion about how this attempt at a biography had actually become an autobiography and he has angst about that as a literary form, and then discusses how he surprisingly likes writing for its own sake, and he gives up on Destry-Scholes... but yes, this became a not-yet-middle-aged (I assume) man and his sexual relationships and there was no musing on whether it was right to have two partners simultaneously and did his partners deserve to know about the other or... anything of that sort of moral relationship nature. No. It was just all about him and his experience.

And so I got really quite disappointed. More than I probably would have been if I hadn't been so delighted by the first half. 

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a cerebral novel about (narrated by) a graduate student of literary analysis who decides he wants to work with "things" instead of in the conceptual stratosphere that he has been used to so far in his academic career. So, he takes up the idea of writing a biography of a celebrated biographer from the beginning of the 20th century whose magnum opus is the 3 volume life of an 18th century British traveler with an absurdly long and disparate list of accomplishments. He begins his research, finds some initially interesting documents and connections, and then (to my mind) allows himself to be derailed.

I recognized some elements from other A.S. Byatt novels in this one: a crisp, white bed from the novel Possession, a sort of personification of Vera, one of the narrator's love interests, and the scent of sweat from Fulla, the other love interest, straight out of Angels and Insects. I think these two love interests are supposed to be complementary to each other, and each of them does fulfill the narrator's desire to work in the realm of "things" in different ways. I wished that these love interests were not set up this way, though, because it made me lose interest in the story--I thought it was a cop out.

The narrator comes to the conclusion that his biographical work is turning out to contain more about himself than about his subject, and there's a suggestion that all biographers' work is that way. He seems to give up the biographical work and turn to assisting his love interests (separately, and it is implied, each without the knowledge of the other) in their work, which in both cases in scientific and involves "things."

There are sparks of interest in this novel, but overall I thought it was a disappointment.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because I love Possession and I took a note in a talk Byatt once gave that she wrote this book because of three parts in Possession where she had to change the POV.

This book is exactly that: an intellectual exercise, quite learned and stuffed w facts, but in the end there's not enough mystery or romance to make it as compelling as Possession. I did find it interesting and enjoyed reading it, but I think this one is for Byatt completists, or as an afterthought to Possession. Or, an in joke for people who can talk about Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus on the fly.

The TL;DR is that all biography is imprecise, and what's shown most clearly is the author, not the subject.

Still, a curious enough oddity to keep me engaged and wondering just how Phineas ended up.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 3 out of 5]

The tale of a biographer writing autobiography whilst doing biographical research on a biographer who wrote autobiographically whilst doing research on three famous people who described the world (taxonomy, eugenics, and playwright) rather than explaining or changing it. I think one of the upshots is that description is valuable, but the world also needs do-ers in addition to watchers. Or live your own life rather than someone else's.

In any case, I liked the postmoderny vibe and the meta parts of it - but I also had a lot of the "I just don't care"'s

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be fair, I have no idea where I left off reading this book. I only know where I’d slept on it. Yes, it put me to sleep every night. So why didn’t I read it in the day? I didn’t want to sleep during the day. I’m vacationing in Delaware. That would wreck the week sleeping my vacation away over this book. This book is probably worth 4⭐️. I’m worth only 1⭐️ using this book as a sleep aid. I’m sorry, my friends, but I had such high hopes for this book…☹️.

[adela · Rating 4 out of 5]

suuuuper raro ? diría que de lo más raro que he leído… un libro en el que hay TANTOS fragmentos de cartas y biografías que te sacan de la historia es pesado de leer pero es que aún así me ha encantado!!! es que hay de todoooo pfff quiero leer más de byatt porque tengo entendido que este es de los más “duros” y que possession se hace más ameno

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a tough one. The story is good with a lot of information but it is not a straight forward tale. There are a lot of historical characters that are named - quite a few of which I don't know. BUT I love the way she writes and I'm glad I read it.

[Martha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I almost never don’t finish a book. This is the exception. I was not interested in the protagonist, the plot was convoluted and seemed pointless. I will attempt Possession by the author and hope for a better outcome.

[Desi A]

Nevermind, this is boring. I loved Possession SO much, but I think I’ll stick to re-reading as I haven’t been able to find something by Byatt that grabs me in the same way.

[Remco de Kok · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this novel, but I suspect it is an acquired taste. It seems like something of a companion piece to Byatt’s Possession. Both are erudite, intertextual, and, well, nerdy novels of academic sleuthing and literary mystery. In The Biographer’s Tale, we meet Phinneas G. Nanson, an undergraduate student who becomes disenchanted with poststructural and postmodern literary theory because of its self-referentiality and lack of connection to the concerete, factual and real world of Facts and Things. This leads him first to attempting to write a biography of an obscure biographer and later to the natural sciences. The novel is fun, playful, deeply metafictional and has hints of both romance and thriller. While Possession remains Byatt’s magnum opus, this one fully deserves 4,5 stars, so rounded off 5 stars.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Byatt has a way of making her characters seem like butterfly specimens pinned to a display. You may admire their intricacies, but you can never feel like you get close to them. Perhaps part of this is because they feel like they come from another time. Oddly enough, although one of the main characters is a new-agey earth mother type and computers and the Internet play a role here and there, the story does not gain much in warmth or a contemporary feel from either element. Nature in this book always feels like a studied facsimile of the real thing. The abandon that the prim Phineas (the main character) supposedly feels with Fulla plays out far too meticulously. For a book where the character is having an affair with two different women, I can't help but question if anyone is really having any fun. Any references to sex felt a little strained and unintentionally comical.

I could go on, but this should give you an idea. I could come up with any number of rationalizations about why Byatt took the approach she did--the thread connecting the biographies the biographer researches is science, so maybe there's a (scientific) method to the madness, but whether it was done thoughtfully or not, life is too short and there is too much else to read to spend copious amounts of time peering at dead insects through glass while trying to care.