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608 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
"So he watched from his window as she tiptoed across the moonlit lawn, head bent under her beret, looking up once at his dark bulk in his darkened window. He lifted his arm in a generous salute, a victorious general. His body was pleasantly warm. His imagination was pleasantly at ease. He did not, he hoped, underestimate the difficulties of the next advance. But he had come so far, so far, with daring and love, it was impossible to imagine he would not go further."
The play's the thing...If Proust, George Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence met in a bar and struck up a conversation about art, love, nature, desire, religion, and literature, you would have something like A. S. Byatt鈥檚 work. As I said last summer in my review of The Children鈥檚 Book, I鈥檓 ashamed it鈥檚 taken me so long to get to her work after a hazy memory of a bad experience with Possession in grad school. 鈥ㄢ€�
鈥淭hey lived by a myth of normality, an image of closed family safeties and certainties. But there were rips and interstices through which the cold blasts howled, had always howled and would howl. That had its exhilarating aspect. Howls, grimaces, naked unreason were not, as the Potter ethic and aesthetic said, temporary aberrations. They were the stuff of things. If you knew they were there you could act, truly.鈥�
鈥淜nowledge was power, as long as one did not muck it up by confusing one piece of knowledge with another and trying to ingest it and turn it all into blood and feelings.鈥�