A.S. Byatt Has a New Set of Short Stories

 I wrote about A.S. Byatt here. I still have yet to get to my notes on her collection of short stories A Little Black Book of Stories and now she has published another collection, Medusa's Ankles.

Lithub published David Mitchell's "Magnificent Hybrids." He provides a bit of a biographical background for the writer and gives his views on Byatt as a short story writer :

A.S. Byatt’s stories bypass this rule of thumb with relish. She is both a highly distinctive stylist—ornate, cerebral, “Byatty”—and a short-story writer whose menu of answers to the question “What form can a story take?” is long, varied and rich. “The July Ghost” is a portrait of a mother who has lost a child and an agnostic ghost story. It is subtle, poignant and ever so slightly trippy. In contrast, “Sugar” is a meandering clamber around a family tree, ripe with memorable anecdote and northernhued. “Precipice-Encurled” is a set of framed narratives about the poet Robert Browning, a family he knew in Italy, a young artist and a woman who models for him. It is sumptuous, expectation-busting, heartbreaking and immune to classification. “Racine and the Tablecloth” is a tale of a vulnerable pupil and her ambiguously predatory schoolmistress set in an all-girls’ boarding school. This may be Muriel Spark turf, but Byatt’s story reads like biography and feels shot in black and white.

And her not being bound by genre convictions, which fits eith my memory of her stories:

“The Lucid Dreamer,” a tale of an experimental psychonaut entering free fall, occupies that zone of British science fiction staked out by J.G. Ballard and John Wyndham. I’m not claiming that Byatt is a genre writer, or that Medusa’s Ankles should be exiled to the SF/Fantasy section (shudder!). The full spectrum of the English literary canon, in all its realist glory, is present and correct too—George Eliot, Henry James, Proust, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch. As a literary traveller, however, Byatt engages with writers as far off the Leavisite road map as the Brothers Grimm, Italo Calvino, Ursula le Guin, Neil Gaiman. (During a conversation with Gaiman I told him how much A.S. Byatt enjoyed his fantasy novel Coraline. He replied without hesitation, “Antonia’s one of us.”) Byatt’s scholarly knowledge of English literature, combined with her freethinking attitude to genre, produces magnificent hybrids.

 Neel Mukherjee over at prefaces a story from this new collection with some comments that hew closer to my recollections:

Then, crowning everything, there’s Ragnarok (2011), her complex reworking of Norse myths about the end of the gods which is also, simultaneously, an account of the origins of the lifelong fascination that myths have held for her. Her best work sits along the seams of the realistic and the fantastical, but the fantastical in her hands becomes a playful and deep—and deeply knowledgeable—meditation on the history and textuality of that mode: she invents, imagines, imitates, creates wonderful pastiches, but we would never mistake her work for another master’s, Ursula Le Guin’s.

I think of sharing with Joyce Carol Oates the ability to look at the horrible with clear eye. I cannot think of a male author, not even Cormac McCarthy, whop does not imbue the terrible with a hint of the romantic.

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