This is the story of a disenchanted graduate student, Phineas G. Nanson, who rejects his work in postmodern literary theory because he's sick of meta-analysis. He decides to substitute a project to write a biography of a reticent biographer. Though he has a desire to be wholly objective, his post-modern training forces him to own his subjectivity. As he collects material for the biography, he moves from a "meta" existence as an observer of observers, to being one of the observers himself, to being the subject of his own story.

The writing is simply beautiful. I'm not a big annotator, but I couldn't bear to let some of the lovely sentences slip by without a pencil mark in the margin, so I could find them again. Like this (p. 194):

"Looking back on my own times, what most strikes me is that we have developed endlessly subtle styles and techniques to reveal the secret meaning behind the apparent meaning, to open up the desires and assumptions behind what people say and explain about what they feel and believe. And all that can really be read into what we write is our own desire to translate everything, everyone, all reasoning, all irrational hope and fear, into our own Procrustean grid of priorities."

I read this book in a day, because the writing was just so pleasurable. I highly recommend it. ( )

A very funny in depth dissection of what "fact" is.
Byatt sends her hero, a dwarf who decides that he does not want to become a postmodernist literary theoretician - because he want things - facts -, on a highly theoretical journey. Thus this is a book of a fictional character who reads the biography of a fictional chacter´s life; the fictional character´s fictional biography is even full of fictional titles of fictional books...... Under all this fiction you can see Richard Burton ( as the "first mover", as the model for Elmer Bole) whose life is full of facts, but whose legacy to the western world is 1001 eastern nights.....and the Tolkien reference is direct and at the starting point, and so poignant that anyone co-travelling with Phineas G. Nanson to the end, will find out what a halfling is.

As for myself; As a co-traveller through the chaotic literary wasteland, fortunately guided by a Chestertonian and Sullivanesque musical verbal virtousity of what is human reality, combined with the Phineas Finnean pass-partout grasp of geography and all things matter; I get a re-confirmation of a personal fact; I know that I`m a hobbit forever!

At outset the setting is academical, but the structure is that of a fairytale; What fun Byatt must have had in the construction!! Names, places, pairs, the reference to the trinity made up of a statician(Francis Galton), the taxonomist(Carl Linné) and the dramatist (Henrik Ibsen) is pure joy for a start -

A fantastical book which - like all fantastical fictional things - of course tells some very true things about life.... ( )

The Maelstrom: how evocative that name is, the Charybdis that tempts you, the whirlpool that draws you down into its watery depths, a volatile spiral maze from which there is no escape. The Maelstrom, or Moskstraumen as the Norwegian original should really be called, features only sporadically in The Biographer’s Tale but its symbolism permeates the whole novel.

In The Biographer’s Tale we have A S Byatt, critic, novelist and onetime academic writing in the first person as Phineas G Nanson. We learn that Nanson, a postgraduate disillusioned with critical theory, is introduced to a biography of Victorian explorer Sir Elmer Bole, author of nearly a dozen texts and a real-life Gahmuret, siring children in Europe and the Middle East. Nanson then becomes obsessed with Bole’s elusive biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, eventually discovering that Destry-Scholes may, in chasing up notes on Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen, have been drawn to his death by the allure of the Maelstrom. Destry-Scholes’ notes and his few relics that the young scholar examines seem to throw doubt not only on what is true and what is fiction but also on whether any single biography is capable of delineating the whole of a subject’s life, works and thoughts. Circles within circles then, but, like the spirals of a whirlpool, all connected in seamless seething turmoil. Hanging over the whole are the questions, who exactly is the biographer – Byatt, Nanson, Bole or Destry-Scholes – and is it the biographer who’s telling the tale or is the tale about the biographer?

I very much enjoyed this erudite yet entertaining fiction: it combined a love of cataloguing, pigeonholing and cryptic puzzles with a snapshot of a gauche young man who, through questing for a particular grail, manages to find some equanimity. It’s not a perfect novel – as critics note, the erudition and the entertainment don’t quite gel a lot of the time – but it certainly gives pause for thought. With its sifting through fact and fiction in the lives of three great cataloguers of minutiae – taxonomer Linnaeus, anthropologist Galton and playwright Ibsen – it becomes evident that, failing a Library of Babel, it is never possible to find out everything about even the small things of life. If it seems that Byatt, through her puppet Nanson, avoids getting to the roots of these conundrums by concluding with Phineas Nanson settling down to a modus vivendi with his complex relationships (the blonde ecologist Fulla Biefeld, the dark-haired Vera Destry-Scholes and the esoteric travel-agents Christophe and Erik), then perhaps that is her message: human relationships matter more than dry fact-filing, however diverting.

Still, shuffling around those cataloguing cards is great fun. Take Phineas Nanson, for example. ‘Phineas’ may remind us of that fictional explorer, Phileas Fogg, who travelled around the world in eighty days; Phineus is also a Thracian prophet who helped Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Phineas’ middle name, Gilbert, may or may not derive from the great English naturalist Gilbert White, himself concerned with the great chain of being. In addition, Byatt tells us that Phineas discovers that “nanus was the Latin for dwarf, cognate with the French nain,” and notes with a frisson that he himself is “a little person, the child of a little person” and that he has a name in a system, Nanson, suggesting that his role as potential biographer renders him of small significance. Of course, there is more to this than Byatt explicitly tells us. Later on, someone mistakenly credits him with the name of the great Norwegian explorer Nansen. The postgraduate scholar willy-nilly finds that nominative determinism has predestined him to be questing, classifying and exploring.

However, a large clue comes from Byatt’s own acknowledgements at the end of the novel. Thanking an entomologist for specialist help, she notes particularly an insect with a suggestive name, Phaeogenes nanus, that reminds us of Phineas’ own name. It may not surprise the reader that this insect is a parasitic wasp, and perhaps gives us an inkling of the role of biographers in the lives of real people. Into such depths does the literary maelstrom deliver us.

http://wp.me/p2oNj1-gZ ( )

I realised about halfway through that I had actually read this before, but had forgotten almost everything about it. Which possibly says something about the sort of book it is: there is a lot of wonderful detail, jokes as well as intelligent speculation about the ways biography, taxonomy, storytelling and scholarship intersect, and about how far we can build up a written portrait of an individual person at all. But it doesn't seem to come together in a very satisfactory way as a novel. It almost feels as though Byatt had intended to write a much longer book and got fed up with it part way through. ( )

Phinias Nansen is a student rejecting intellectual convention of post stucturalism who longes for old fashioned facts. So he leaves his post grad project and starts to write a biography of Destry Scholes a biographer of sir Boles, but from the start it is clear that the student lacks the talent for research and writing. But that's not the only joke Byatt has in store: the biographer and his subject are so common for the Victorian Age and the fifties that you almost believe the existence of them in real history but they are inventions of Byatt. But in stead of finding data the former student starts to relive the live of the subject of his subject even having to different love affairs with two totally different women. He finds no data about Destry-Scholes himself but a lot of cards that are the building stones of a new biographic project by Scholes, which is of course an invention of the writer of the book but this time based on fiction after the fictions of biographers and subjects of biographies themselves introduced in their times and writings. So we are lost in fragments of fantasies of and sometimes by Carl Linnaeus, Henrik Ibsen and Francis Galton,
Byatt's power as a storyteller, her ability to create atmosphere, and her romantic use Dickensian detail—do much to keep you interested but of course there is not a happy end if there is an end to the story at all.

Phineas' exploration of Destry-Scholes' manuscript and note-cards occupy almost the entire novel – a mistake in emphasis for a storyteller of Byatt's power. The Destry-Scholes’s manuscript is really three biographies, of the taxonomer Carl Linnaeus, of a Victorian named Francis Galton, and of playwright Henrik Isben. Destry-Scholes's writings are interesting enough--tinged, as they are, with Byatt's fine fictional additions--but then we come upon Phineas's interminable note-card sorting.

He finds he can arrange the note-cards into almost any sort of grouping he likes, such as "hybrids and mixtures," "composite portrait (photography)," or "(composite) portrait photography." This is intended as a ridicule of modern literary criticism and the impossible task of creating a true biography. ( )