The Byatt reread continues

Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This contains five short stories. "A Stone Woman" gets five stars and is among the best work Byatt's done. "The Thing in the Forest" is a four, and the rest are pretty solid threes for me, so the collection as a whole rates a four.

"The Thing in the Forest" is about two girls evacuated from Britain into the countryside during war time. They see a terrible Worm in the forest, and that moment shapes their adult lives. Midpoint, Byatt reveals an additional horror about the Worm, and by the story's end, one woman has decided to allow the Worm to kill her; the other describes the terror of the Worm as the flipside of the sublime, and at the story's end, she decides to make her encounter with the Worm part of her repertoire as a storyteller. Byatt plays so beautifully with fairy tale and myth, and this is no exception.

"Body Art" I don't much like at all. I mean, the language is always beautiful; the descriptions are always thought-provoking. Byatt is always saying something about art, about writing, about the creative mind. The plot of this one, though, is pretty ho-hum for me.

"A Stone Woman" is about a woman who works as a researcher for a dictionary; after a terrible illness, she realizes she's turning into stone. This story is exquisite. It is about grief and loss and aging. It is about words--the glorious and precise words Ines uses to describe the gems and minerals and crystals which begin to encrust her body. It about becoming and finding a new way of being when other avenues are cut off. I love this story so freaking hard.

"Raw Materials" is a send-up of the writer's workshop. What is writing really? Who is a writer? What is good writing? What is the purpose of writing for both the writer and the reader? It's also about surfaces and what lies beneath.

"The Pink Ribbon" is about a man who's spent the past five years caring for a wife with dementia. This story is bleak and feels too real, like a moment I could be headed for myself and nothing I want to read about.



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