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Title: The Game by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0-679-74256-5 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.9 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A.S. Byatt's rich style
Comment: I had read _Babel Tower_ before I found _The Game_, so I was
already somewhat familiar with Byatt's style. _The Game_, though its plot is not as complex as _Tower_ per se, is much more rich in many ways. The novel deals intimately with the lives of two sisters (and secondarily, a daughter), and Byatt keeps all her characters in perspective. Though several male characters are in the book, Byatt makes sure the reader knows they are only part of the game the sisters play. This is especially evident when reading two seperate fight scenes: the first is between one sister and her husband, and though it describes violence (hurled furniture, angry shouts) its tone stays amazingly static and aloof. On the other hand, when the same sister and her daughter have an about equally violent fight, the language is much more emotional and gripping. This is just one example of the almost perfect control Byatt has over her words. I would have to say she is one of the best masters of diction and style I have come across yet.
Rating: 2
Summary: A foreshadowing of Byatt's work to come
Comment: This earlier novel deals with many of Byatt's favorite themes: the relationships between sisters, the creative process, literary criticism, the academic world, the struggle of married women to retain their intellectual and personal identity within a circumscribing institution. The game of the title is an Arthurian fantasy devised in childhood by two intense, competitive, and willful sisters, now estranged. To the sisters, the game retains even in adulthood a vibrance and power to which real life cannot compare. To the reader, however, the game is frustratingly vague. In later works, Byatt would have articulated the game as an alternative and interwoven narrative, but here Byatt refuses readers access to the tantalizing imaginative world of her characters. Thus, the characters remain slightly repellent ciphers and the novel seems merely a earlier draft for the richer novels Byatt had not yet written. This books seems to be more closely autobiographical than some later works on the same themes, and perhaps for this reason she feels compelled to keep the reader at arm's length.
An unsatisfying exercise interesting only in the context of Byatt's later writings.
Rating: 5
Summary: GET REAL
Comment: Julia, a writer, and Cassandra, an Oxford professor, are two sisters pushing into their 40s that have been estranged for 20 years ever since a man named Simon Moffit came between them and then disappeared from their lives. One day as they are watching television they learn that Simon has now become a naturalist similar to the Crocodile Hunter who likes to get close to dangerous animals in their native habitat. Simon is also coming back to England after being away filming his documentaries and back into the two sister's lives. Julia has gotten married in the meantime and has a child that looks suspiciously like Simon while Cassandra has tried to distance herself from reality, shying from human interaction, cocooned in her office at Oxford. Simon's return will force both of the sisters to examine the loss of their childhood bond when they played an imaginary game, a la the Bronte sisters, in which they chronicled the exploits of knights and ladies to make the time go by. They will also have to figure out their feelings for Simon after spending half their life pining for what has become a man they know now only through tv images and imagination and memories.
This was A.S. Byatt's second novel, published in 1967, the summer of love and all that business. It is a masterful work. Julia runs into trouble when she writes a book about Simon and Cassandra and all the mess they went through. Both sisters begin to question whether their lives have become fiction or whether the fictions they made up as kids have become their lives. It is an interesting question for a writer's second work and one which I've seen taken up by Dostoyevsky. The Game is really about whether other people's perceptions of us is stronger than our own self-image. It illustrates what happens to those who are strong enough to shake that image and those weak enough to have their personalities shaped by those they love.
I had always known of Byatt by reputation but this is the first book I have read by her. I am very happy that she did not disappoint and look forward to reading the works of her maturity.
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Title: The Shadow of the Sun by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0156814161 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 16 April, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0679762221 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0375705759 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 11 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature) by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0674008332 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0375725083 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 04 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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