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Carregando... A Whistling Woman (2002)de A.S. Byatt
  
Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.   ) amoskovacs | Oct 24, 2023 |  The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman 0. Pre-reading notes: -This is a big undertaking. Four 500-odd page books, a series, historical; all of these examples of what I usually avoid. But written by A S Byatt, who I do not want to miss. -Many reviewers find this quartet high literature. Many others think it is trash, or at least not anything great. So Im on my own as far as evaluating it/them. I read Virgin in the Garden, and Babel Tower, some long years ago, as far as I recall, without remembering any real details about either. -I want to read the four books, over time, taking notes, and trying to keep track of how I think of the works as I go. (four paperbacks, totaling almost 2000 pages) -A S Byatt, born 1938, Sheffield, Yorkshire she is two years older than me 1. *The Virgin in the Garden* 1978, 438p takes place about 1953- -Much literary, English culture, and other refs. Maybe more than I want to put up with, though the stories carry me along so far, about 60 pages in. -I don’t yet recall anything from my first reading of virgin, nor do I recall knowing then that virgin and babel were related. -My original plan to analyze the texts closely may have to be changed as the mere number of pages to read could put me off. -I remembered almost nothing from my long-ago first reading. -three main stories, one for each of the Potter children, Fredrica, Stephane, Marcus, with many other characters. -The writing is very good, dense, detailed. I did skip some paragraphs, ones about plant names, other names, the details of the play, and such. Byatt makes me want to read every passage, and I would if the book wasn’t so long. I did want to get on with the stories, and wished for fewer words. 2. *Still Life* 1985, 385p -this is only one of the four in the series without a Kindle edition, though I have a fairly clean paper copy, with not so small print; it has no table of contents though. There is epigraphs, a prologue (1980), & 33 chapters (~12pg/ch) ch 1 1953 -at ~p.160, Fredrica is interesting but not very likable. she’s used to show how life in 50s oxbridge is getting on, while Stephanie’s story shows more of what happens in the country, especially with women - 3. *Babel Tower* 1996, 633p -by the time I get to Babel Tower, i know most of the characters and their history, and can pick up the new characters easily -reading ebooks make for easy access to unfamiliar, mostly British or scholarly, words, and to searches online for places and persons and events -this is the longest of the series, with its own book-in-book -I did more skimming here than with the others, since passages did get tedious in places for me, still i avidly followed the stories and read to the point of eyestrain 4. *A Whistling Woman* 2002, 430p -another ambitious novel, with many new characters and many of those from the previous books showing up too -maybe the most disturbing of the four, about many deeply flawed, psychologically harmed people, a cult that could not end well, but a novel with an ending that promised hope for most of the characters -definitely about the 60s, 70s, with all the experiments and changes these years brought; the pill, psychotropics, TV, science, computers, cold war, education, liberation and oppression, nature vs nurture; Byatt seems to mention everything that happened, writing three decades later -I probably skimmed less in this than the other three books, looked up characters more since I had forgotten who was who with new ones and with minor figures who showed up again 5. All in all, the four books are a very good read. It’s about periods I lived through, 1950s-70s, and can relate to and have opinions about and still am happy to read about. It is four works that help me continue put that period into some sort of perspective. I'll continue to think about these books. There is still much in them that I don't yet have the context to fully understand. ( ) mykl-s | Aug 28, 2021 | ) Charon07 | Jul 16, 2021 | The irony, as Frederica notes, is that contrary to everything Dr Leavis taught her, the one thing that doesn't seem to be playing any important role at all in all this scientific-philosophical-religious upheaval is English literature. D H Lawrence is out, Freud and Jung and Chomsky are in. Frederica's own book, Laminations, has aroused interest only among literary journalists (who like having the photo of a TV celebrity to put over their columns), whilst Agatha's Tolkienesque fantasy story Flight North has been ignored by reviewers but turns into a phenomenal word-of-mouth success. There's a huge amount to take in here, and it's thrown at us so fast that it's easy to get lost. There is still plenty of comedy along the way, but it's offset by our awareness that there are some very bad things going on, and vulnerable people are obviously going to get hurt, especially in the cult and among the student rebels. So it's not as much fun to read as Babel Tower, but still very worthwhile. ( ) thorold | Oct 13, 2020 | ) bostonbibliophile | Sep 6, 2018 |
A Whistling Woman is the final book in the Frederica Quartet. It continues the story of Frederica Potter and the rest of the Potter clan, along with a whole host of other interesting characters, including Frederica‟s lover computer programmer John Ottokar and his twin Paul-Zag, the scientists Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar, Vice-Chancellor of the North Yorkshire University Sir Gerard Wijnnobel, lysergic-acid-dropping psychiatrist Elvet Gander, rabble-rouser Jonty Surtrees, and the charismatic Manichean Josh Lamb/Joshua Ramsden, who sees blood dripping from everything. Julia Corbett and Simon Moffitt, from Byatt‟s previous novel The Game, are also mentioned briefly. By far the strongest parts of ''A Whistling Woman'' have to do with the unfolding drama of a Quaker therapeutic community called the Spirit's Tigers, which is gradually taken over and turned into a religious cult by a former mental patient named Joshua Lamb, who, while still a ''plump, pitiable boy,'' witnessed his father's murder of his mother and sister. Byatt's writing about Lamb's gradual descent into self-protective madness and the way in which unbearable personal trauma becomes organized into a lunatically meaningful philosophical system is superb, and demonstrates the empathic powers that are available to her every bit as much as her daunting intellectual reach. ''A Whistling Woman'' is defiantly not for everyone, especially since Byatt is less concerned with keeping the reader happy than with keeping her eye on the vast prospect before her, and the larger arc of her vision is hard to keep in sight even if you're familiar with the three earlier novels. The broad sweep of Byatt’s literary and intellectual enquiry is undoubtedly impressive. There’s a section where Frederica refers to her own previous books which had been described by reviewers as "irritatingly clever". It’s clearly a reference to some of Byatt’s previous books that have received similar criticism. But the problem is not that A Whistling Woman is clever - the more clever writers the better. The problem is that her subject matter and her ‘cleverness’ are not always integrated into the narrative. Thus, although the novel comes in at over 400 pages, its narrative could be contained in considerably less. With A Whistling Woman, A S Byatt concludes one of the grandest and most ambitious fictional projects anyone has undertaken since the war.... Now that it is complete, the cycle seems contained by one unchanging imaginative concept; this volume clarifies the intellectual structure of the whole cycle. Whatever the eventual failures of A Whistling Woman and of the tetralogy as a whole, its massive ambition can never be called into question. Rejecting sensation and attitude, Byatt has instead explored sense and thought, and the problematic notion of how they can possibly be represented in fiction. And like the characters here whose ideas prefigure the search for a Theory of Everything, she has attempted to create a kind of fictional unity that few other writers could even imagine. Watching it break apart, one senses, is just as interesting for her as watching it struggle to cohere. For her readers, this is not always the case, but it's a very close-run thing. Pertence à sérieEstá contido emTem um guia de estudo para estudantesPrêmios
Amid the effervescence and turbulence of the 1960s, Frederica finds a career in television in London, while events in Yorkshire threaten to turn her life and the lives of the people she loves upside down. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.93)
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