On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays by A. S. Byatt

This is the second book of essays by Byatt I tried reading, and I'm again disappointed. Byatt is in the rare position of being an author whose books literary critics have written about, and who is able to answer their critiques and analyses. Though she writes about historical novels (specifically contemporary and postmodern historical fiction), she keeps coming back to herself and discussing her own intentions and ideas. I found it really annoying that she seems not to accept that her books could have said anything she did not mean them to say, she refutes an analysis of her own work by Sally Shuttleworth by restating her own intentions, and disregarding the patterns and ideas that Shuttleworth finds. As to her analysis of others' fiction, I found it incredibly shallow. She spends most of the time summarising the books she discusses and giving extensive quotations that sometimes cover over a page, and draws connections and patterns that are completely obvious. Her summaries are either useless (in the case of books I have read) or hopelessly confusing (in the case of ones I haven't) because they only focus on certain themes that she finds important and shove aside everything else. Basically, she does what every student in every university and even school is begged not to do: summarise and spit out endless quotations, accompanied by nebulous explanations. Her central arguments she restates again and again in the various essays. She often writes 'I don't have the time to fully explain this or that', which just makes me ask, why on earth not? Usually, this seems to be merely a device to avoid proving some claim she made, and which she seems unwilling to back up. Why did she even bother writing these essays, if she decided to put some bizarre space constraints on herself? To my annoyance, she also spends a lot of time putting down modernism and its lack of narrative structure, which I personally enjoy. I will say one thing for this book though: it provides a hell of a reading list. Byatt cites many interesting books and authors and describes them engagingly. But except for this, I found this book to obvious in its observations (wouldn't even go so far as to call them arguments) and to scattered in its structure.