Possession

I don’t read romances but a friend who also does not read them highly recommended this book for content, style, sheer enjoyment.

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This is a beautifully written novel that has many layers. At its core is a romance fit for the giants of 19th century novels and poetry. It’s as if the brontës and the shelleys were back. But that doesn’t do byatt justice: she created two characters who are flesh and blood in their own right, and gave them poetic voices that are incredibly personalized… what a delight! The poetry is all the richer for the story, and vice versa. The novel invites the reader to understand how the life of an artist is an essential part and key to understanding their works.This brings us to the second layer: beyond the love story and the poetry is a very ironic and good humored critique of the academia in the late 80s, early 90s - the extremely alienating postmodern fad as well as the „cultural/womens/etc“ studies that were developing at the time. As the protagonists and villains of modern day literature departments compete for academic renown, as the different schools piece their knowledge separately together, as Michell falls in love with Maud, Byatt unwinds the story of an academia that has lost the big picture: the picture of what matters.One of the most important scenes is at the end, when Michell rediscovers what brought him into the English department to start with: poetry. I think she says something like this: Michell realized his love for poetry superseded his commitment to ideas of poetry expounded by the different schools of literary criticism. This is brilliant!I remember studying litterateur under the postmoderns. There’s nothing but the text. The author doesn’t matter. Biographies didn’t matter. The text was taken apart and formed into whatever the accidental school held as its dogma, as it’s ideology. This kind of literary criticism kills the individuality of the artwork and the individuality of the human experience as expressed and lived by the author. The literary critic forces the author to become parroting minions, and closes his interpretation to anything new the author has to say. Hats off to Byatt for demonstrating this in a novel!You can choose how many layers of the novel you wish to experience. For the general audience, the romance itself is more than satisfying. For those up for more meta-reading, this book is full of little sweet punches against the dictating fashions of those times. We’re currently in the death throes of the postmodern, but it’s amazing she already wrote this in the 90s.5 stars. I wish she had written more!

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J'ai choisi cette note pour un roman qui est d'une originalité extrême, qui rend hommage à la poésie, à son pouvoir magnétique, à la beauté de sa musique, qui déploie une intrigue qui unit passé et présent, folklore, ethnologie et spiritisme, trois courants du XIXe siècle, avec les tensions académiques d'aujourd'hui, plongeant le lecteur dans deux époques contrastées, le puritanisme victorien (et la force de la transgression) et la libéralisation des mœurs aujourd'hui. Un roman que tout collectionneur doit lire, recommandé aussi aux chercheurs passionnés. Evidemment il faut être sensible à la poésie. Il est très bien écrit. L'ayant lu en anglais je ne peux rien dire sur la traduction française. Ce roman m'a fait penser à celui, remarquable, de Wilkie Collins, "The moon stone".