Name: Possession
ISBN: 9780679735908

A. S. Byatt

A young academic couple's attempt to trace the relationship between two turbulent, romantic, and superstitious Victorian poets reveals uncanny parallels with their own lives and culminates in the exhumation of a poet's corpse. Reissue. 300,000 first printing. (A Warner Bros. film, directed by Neil LaBute, releasing Fall 2001, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jennifer Ehle, & Jeremy Northam) (General Fiction)

A Romance

Possession

ausra

An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust.

We pass the time of day - and the Time of the Universe has a brief stop at our fingers' touch.

"This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run"

No mere human can stand in a fre and not be consumed.

No writer has written well enough of the Bliss of sleep. Coleridge wrote of the pains of sleep, and Macbeth speaks of a sleep foregone - but not of the bliss of relaxing one's grip of the world and warmly and motionlessly moving into another. Folded in by curtains, closed in by the warmth of blankets, without weight, it seems-

Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. 

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

sariya

"That was no problem nowadays, books travelled the aether like light."

"'The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modified it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence."

"The clock ticked, motes of dust danced in sunlight, Roland meditated on the tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge."

"A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love indifference and dislike, also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forbears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else, too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come."

"The picture gave no clear impression of anyone in particular; it was generic Victorian lady, specific shy poetess."

"If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination."

"Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may not taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise."

"Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong."

"A beautiful woman... seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows, with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing."

"He tended his body, the outward man, with a fastidiousness that he would have bestowed on the inner man too, if he had known who he was, if he did not feel the whole thing to be thickly veiled. He only thought of this intermittently when, as now, he was encased in smooth black solitude and on the move."

"What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on. Hoc opus, hic labor est."

"I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But I now think—it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet?"

"...poets don't want homes—do they?—they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds."

to think of all the letters that are never read nor heard by their addressees but may one day be received by readers of the future 😭 

is packed to the brim with musings on poetry, reading, Romance, class, academia, biography, cultural imperialism, a writer's life, a woman's autonomy, doing so with such care and craft. truly a literature lover's wet dream. what's funny is that halfway through this book, i thought it was great, but not transformative—and then the final chapter + postscript decided to gut me so much that i was sobbing in my room at 4 am. unfair of any writer to leave me so devastated. i can see how rewarding a future reread will be.

alice

to think of all the letters that are never read nor heard by their addressees but may one day be received by readers of the future 😭 

possession is packed to the brim with musings on poetry, reading, Romance, class, academia, biography, cultural imperialism, a writer's life, a woman's autonomy, doing so with such care and craft. truly a literature lover's wet dream. what's funny is that halfway through this book, i thought it was great, but not transformative—and then the final chapter + postscript decided to gut me so much that i was sobbing in my room at 4 am. unfair of any writer to leave me so devastated. i can see how rewarding a future reread will be.

So rich and lush, it took me forever to read but it was because I wanted to savor every bit of it 

Jacque

I'm not exactly sure on my thoughts with this one. I picked it up initially for research on twentieth century lit and feminism, and while there's plenty of content about those here, it's also incredibly lonngggg. The story drags on quite a bit and I think it's because of the unconventional storytelling. The story is told through snippets of poems, stories, letters, from people who are not the main characters. This removed me from the story and made me feel less attached to them. 

There were some funny moments and I sort of enjoyed this style of storytelling (although I think it could've been executed differently and more succinctly). It's not my worse read this year but won't be picking it up again 🤷‍♀️.

Paige Leitner

Hmmmmm...

I'm not exactly sure on my thoughts with this one. I picked it up initially for research on twentieth century lit and feminism, and while there's plenty of content about those here, it's also incredibly lonngggg. The story drags on quite a bit and I think it's because of the unconventional storytelling. The story is told through snippets of poems, stories, letters, from people who are not the main characters. This removed me from the story and made me feel less attached to them. 

There were some funny moments and I sort of enjoyed this style of storytelling (although I think it could've been executed differently and more succinctly). It's not my worse read this year but won't be picking it up again 🤷‍♀️.

from:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christabel_LaMotte

Possession: A Romance is a 1990 bestselling novel by British writer A. S. Byatt. It is a winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

Part historical as well as contemporary fiction, the title Possession refers to issues of ownership and independence between lovers, the practice of collecting historically significant cultural artifacts, and to the possession that a biographer feels of their subject. The novel incorporates many different styles and devices: diaries, letters and poetry, in addition to third-person narration. Possession is as concerned with the present day as it is with the Victorian era, pointing out the differences between the two time periods satirizing such things as modern academia and mating rituals.

Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

a romance

Gigi V

Difficult to get through, only cause I don't like reading poetry

A S Byatt

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE

Sarah Escorsa

This was a very good read although I had a hard time with the modern day characters. I understood their motivations but just couldn't get myself to like them... The book cover bothered me quite a bit since I couldn't see the resemblance between the actors and the characters as Byatt describes them in the book -besides, I don't like either Gwyneth Paltrow or Aaron Eckhart, so that didn't help;) What I did like very much were the historical parts and how the letters between Ash and Christabel La Motte, their poems and stories and the diary written by LaMotte's cousin helped the story develop. I also found the (sometimes sardonic) description of academic researchers very interesting, even though the characters seemed somehow "less alive" than the historical ones.

Summer Stanley

Brilliantly crafted story that intertwined so many relationships of all natures. Required diligent attention to detail and commanded the engagement of the reader. I was absolutely captivated by this story and its themes.

Antonia Susan Byatt

La destinée du jeune professeur Roland Mitchell paraît étrangement liée à celle du grand poète victorien Randolph Henry Ash dont il est un des plus grands spécialistes. Le jour où, d'un livre poussiéreux, il exhume deux lettres d'amour que le poète adresse à une tendre inconnue, cette découverte bouleverse le cours de ses travaux... et de sa vie. Sur les traces du grand homme, le jeu de piste est ouvert : documents volés, amours clandestines, suicide romantique peuplent l'aventure qui dépassera bientôt le simple cadre d'une recherche universitaire. Possession, couronné en 1990 par le prestigieux Booker Prize, est un récit haletant, subtil mélange d'érudition, de romance et de suspense, qui a été traduit dans vingt-deux pays et a rencontré un succès mondial. L'adaptation de ce chef-d'œuvre au cinéma est signée par Neil LaBute (En compagnie des hommes, 1999 et Nurse Betty, 2001), avec Gwyneth Paltrow et Aaron Eckhart dans les rôles principaux.

roman romanesque

Eugenia Andino

Fantastic, a book that reconciles me with 19th century novels and criticism. Very critical of University life and research in humanities, particularly of biographical criticism.

Andrada D

Nice try, but no. 
Terribly pretentious, exceedingly tedious, painfully melodramatic, of great depth but little understanding, Possession is a pretentious lame attempt at an old fashioned romance that fails on every level. 
Not worth reading, but has its good moments that finally redeems it in some way.

Possession A Romance

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