The Shadow of the Sun Book

As in the case of Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, I think I like The Shadow of the Sun, A. S. Byatt's first book, the best of all. Possession is much more complex, of course. This is probably the most unadorned writing she has done, and it seems to get more ornate with every book. I do love the complexity of her books. But in this book are her first formulated philosophical ideas, her first and most pungent characters, the clearest and simplest definition of her plotting, and it works. Completely works. It reminds me of not only my adored Rumer Godden books, as do all Byatt's novels, despite the fact that Byatt is admittedly better, but also of another great favorite of mine: Colette. Colette and Gide and Pater and Ruskin. This book was the freshman project of Byatt when she was a recent college graduate, wife and mother, who like her character Stephanie in Still Life, and the more minor character of Jenny in Virgin in the Garden, is desperately clinging to everything she learned in her English degree, brooding over it with intensified lust for the printed word because she can't immerse herself in literature anymore now that she is married and a mother of little babies. The explicitly described experience of that waited to be depicted in later books, but the feelings are most noticeable here, despite the unrelated plot. Her passion for English literature comes out in this in the writing, rather than in the incessant literary name-dropping (which I don't mind) of most of her other books. So straight from her own life comes plot and feeling with nothing to veil it, and I like it.