The Biographer's Tale
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Average rating2.7
From the award-winning author of Possession comes an ingenious novel about love and literary sleuthing: a dazzling fiction woven out of one man's search for fact.Here is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of "real life" by writing a biography of a great biographer. In a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic, scientific and sensual, Phineas tracks his subject to the deserts of Africa and the maelstrom of the Arctic. Along the way he comes to rely on two women, one of whom may be the guide he needs out of the dizzying labyrinth 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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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.
