Babel Tower

A.S. Byatt

ISBN 10: 0679405135 / ISBN 13: 9780679405139

Verlag: Random House, new york, 1996

Beschreibung

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First U.S. Edition/First Printing. This copy has been Inscribed by Booker Prize Winning author A.S. Byatt on the title page! " For Daniel Wheeler from A S Byatt". Babel Tower is a soaring achievement, an exhilarating evocation of the private and public obsessions of Britain in the 1960s. At the heart of the novel are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story" a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Signed by Author(s).

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 007514

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Babel Tower
• Verlag: Random House, new york
• Erscheinungsjahr: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 0679405135
• ISBN-13: 9780679405139
• Einband: Hardcover
• Auflage: 1st Edition
• Druck: 1st Printing
• Zustand: Fine
• Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Fine
• Signiert: Inscribed by Author(s)

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

At the heart of the novel are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of the rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure - the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.
We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of the children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.
Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. And so the personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

A. S. Byatt has taught English and American and literature at University College, London.

A.S. Byatt is the author of Possession, winner of the Booker Prize and a national bestseller.  Her two novels that lead up to Babel Tower, tracing the fortunes of Frederica and her family through the 1950's, are The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, and her other fiction includes The Shadow of the Sun, The Game, Angels and Insects and two collections of shorter works: Sugar and Other Stories and The Matisse Stories.  She has also published three volumes of critical work, of which Passions of the Mindis the most recent.  She has taught English and American literature at University College, London, and is a distinguished critic and reviewer. She lives in London.