Sugar and Other Stories

by A. S. Byatt

Hardcover, 1987

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Scribner's, c1987.

Description

Fiction. Short Stories. Historical Fiction. HTML: A.S. Byatt's short fictions, collected in paperback for the first time, explore the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss and the elaborate memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder..

User reviews

LibraryThing member thorold
Byatt's first published collection of short stories, which appeared in between the novels Still life and Possession, contains eleven stories, mostly written for The New Yorker or Encounter. The subjects advance in a suspiciously logical sequence through the book: women's education, mother-daughter
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relationships, ghosts, accusations of witchcraft, writers and mortality. The opening story, "Racine and the Tablecloth", has a younger version of Frederica (called Emily here) at boarding school in York and locked in a struggle with a small-minded headmistress who thinks academic achievement is no excuse for refusing to engage with the community life of the school, in a kind of inverted Miss Jean Brodie set-up.

"Precipice-encurled" is particularly interesting in the light of what is to come in that it's historical fiction about Robert Browning — we meet him and his sister in Venice a couple of years after Elizabeth's death, planning a visit to friends in their holiday retreat in the Apennines, and sketching out a poem about Descartes.

The autobiographical title-story also ties a lot of threads together: the narrator talks about her memories of her (paternal) grandparents, who ran a sweet factory in Conisbrough, and reflects on how much creative fiction goes into family memories: her firsthand memories are conditioned by the way her mother "improved" the facts to turn them into family anecdotes, and she herself adds her professional writer's instinct to turn events into stories. She also talks about her father's death and his passion for Van Gogh (tying into Still Life, of course) and about her passion for Norse mythology and Ragnarök, which she traces back to a book her mother had used "as a crib" whilst doing compulsory Old Norse and Icelandic for her English degree, and which she read as a young child. And that, of course, links into several of her later novels, including Possession.
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LibraryThing member iubookgirl
I was first turned on to Byatt by a lovely woman who loved English fiction due to the time she spent abroad. Though A. S. Byatt is acclaimed for her novels like Possession, I find her short stories much more readable and engaging. This is my favorite of her collections.
LibraryThing member KayCliff
Themes seem to run from story to story. The first two are both about differences between generations (women's); 2-4 about death and survival, and attitude to ancestors, which links with former generations in 1; No 5, `The dried witch', ends with her death and survival. Also theme of woman ageing,
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which carries on through 7, 9, 10 (Juliana). Then 6 and 7 are about literature and language. The heroine of 6 is a lecturer in lit; of 7 is a writer, with treatment again of the theme of death. The heroine of 8 is another woman writer, now introducing the theme of fear - or carrying it on from the end of previous story. Fear (woman's) is main theme of next story, 9. Sudden death, literature (and art), and one generation investigating an earlier one, in 10.
Then the last one, 11, which gives the collection its title, and from which
the cover pictures derive. It chiefly reverts to theme of family history, inter-generational relations, development.
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Language

Barcode

6276
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