book review: Possession

[psocoptera]

Possession, A.S. Byatt. Oh look, I read a literary novel. It was fun, to stretch the reading muscles a little, use some of those long-ago liberal-arts-school skills, try to think through possible essay topics in the middle of the night when I need things to think about. Would have been a fun book to read with a group.

I'm particularly curious how other people read some bits at the end, specifically,

1) do you think Roland went on to ever actually write any poems?
2) did you read Roland and Maud ending up in bed together as a happy ending? (I did not; I hadn't felt any chemistry between them, and I felt like it ended the novel on a pessimistic note, that nothing can really change, that the patterns of the past were doomed to repeat. Things were looking up for awhile there for the modern analogues - Val gets the happy ending Blanche doesn't, Beatrice Nest presides over a release and sharing of information instead of Ellen Ash's withholding of it - and Roland and Maud came so close to having this beautiful connection as scholars and kindred spirits. And then they trade their intellectual relationship for one of bodies (and I do think, in the world of this novel, that it is a trade, and not an adding-on). Byatt tells us, in the last paragraph before the epilogue, that the world smells hopeful, but... it just didn't read that way to me at all.)

I am tempted to add a 3) about Mortimer Cropper and whether I'm too American to dislike him as much as I think I was supposed to, but probably anyone else who might possibly want to discuss this book with me is also American.

Comments

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Man, I love Amazon. (And Google Books.) I use it a fair bit for books I actually have there in my hand, when I'm trying to remember where in this 500-page book we heard that name before, or who else used that phrase, and I don't want to flip through. (Or for fic writing, like, "does character x ever use this piece of slang or is that just character y".)

[ursula]

Yeah, for textbooks especially I wish there could be some sort of package deal, where you got search rights with your hardcopy.