Possession: A Romance [ A S BYATT] [BOOKER PRIZE 1990 ]

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."

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Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession—the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject—she is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics—Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.

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Fabulous, sumptuous, and superb. This is one complex, twisted, literary-type book that is also fascinating and intensely readable. I often start reading books of this genre with a sense of trepidation, because however good they are, they're also so often dense and maze-like with the vividness of the characters and plot bogged down in the author's strivings for intellectual/pyschological depth, with the result that the reader is always kept at a distance, struggling like a drowning man to feel empathy for the characters and to actually WANT to continue reading. This book is different-it flows along with an unselfconscious and almost effortless ease, establishing the characters as empathetic human people in our minds and moving the plot along without unnecessary jargon, while at the same time layering it with a rich tapestry of words, details, and emotions, so that the past and the present pictured in the novel weave together and reflect on each other. I was stunned and carried along by the ease with which one sentence flows into the next, and riveted by the characters and the passion of the world I found myself in. Once in a long while I find a book in which I can actually feel my brain expanding at the depth and stunning simplicity of the author's vision. This is one of them-read it. It's passionate and lyrical, rich and wonderful.

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Cover as shown in the scanned pictures above.

Condition of book is 9/10.
Dog-eared - No, but corners a little blunt
Yellow Sides - No.
Spline - very good - gently read once.

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