The Biographer's Tale

Random House, Sydney, 2000. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good Condition/Very Good. This is the first Australian edition. Size: Octavo (standard book size). 265 pages. Text body is clean, and free from previous owner annotation, underlining and highlighting. Binding is tight, covers and spine fully intact. Pages lightly tanned throughout. Dust Jacket is in very good condition, without tears or chips or other damage. Edges browned slightly. This book is available and ready to be shipped.. In this witty, Borges-like novel, A.S. Byatt weaves a dazzling fiction out of one man's search for fact. Fed up with stultifying criticism, Phineas G. decides to study the messiness of 'real things and facts.' Doing nothing by halves he sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a 'whole life' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of tools and randomly assorted photographs. Trails run cold and mysteries are unresolved. Phineas feels he is hunting shadows. Like a shamaflying across the globe, his mind tracks his subject to African deserts and Arctic maelstroms, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science. He meets others building wholes from bits and pieces: taxonomists, ecologists, even travel agents offering 'the trip of your dreams'. In the process he also puzzles out his own future - but what will guide him out of the labyrinth? Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: Fiction; Contemporary Fiction; Britain/UK; ISBN: 0701169451. ISBN/EAN: 9780701169459. Pictures of this item not already displayed here available upon request. Inventory No: 9477. . 9780701169459