From Library Journal
Still Life is the second volume of a te tralogy. The three Potter children, Stephanie, Frederika and Marcus, in troduced in The Virgin in the Garden ( LJ 2/15/79), continue in conflict with their Yorkshire roots. To them, and to the author, intellectual passions are as all-encompassing as emotional ties, and always at war with them. Frederika, whose novel this really is, escapes to Cambridge and the life of the mind, al beit not without constant struggle. Mar cus, after a long breakdown, manages to stay and function in Yorkshire. Stephanie, having opted for small-town family life, loses her fight to retain an independent intellectual existence and is horribly vanquished by the material world in the book's one tragic moment. This is an opaque, challenging, and re warding novel . While its intellectual preoccupations and allusions will not be readily accessible to a broad reading public, it belongs in major fiction col lections. Diana Vincent-Davis, New York Univ. Sch . of Law Lib.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
Product Description
Frederica Potter, "doomed to be intelligent'' plunges into Cambridge Universty life greedy for knowledge, sex and love. In Yorkshire her sister Stephanie has abandoned academe for the cosy frustration of the family. Alexander Wedderburn, now in London, struggles to write a play about Van Gogh, whose art and tragic life give the novel its central Leitmotiv. In this sequel to
The Virgin in the Garden, A.S Byatt illuminates the inevitable conflicts between ambition and domesticity, confinement and self-fulfilment, while providing a subtle yet incisive observation of intellectual and cultural life in England during the 1950s.
--Ce texte provient de la
Paperback
édition.