Sugar and Other Stories
A. S. Byatt
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0679742271
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A.S. Byatt's short fictions, collected in paperback for the first time, explore the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss and the elaborate memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.
loving him too much, not exactly at that moment, not thinking too precisely about his living ankle, cutting him off. My poor mother maybe — in part — cut him off too efficiently, too early, faced it all too absolutely and too soon. During the war, I have been told recently, the Air Force wrote to her relations begging them to influence her to desist from writing despairing letters to her husband in North Africa. Wives were asked to keep cheerful, to tell good news, not to distress the men. She
pink, who had lain only ten minutes ago inside her satin casing clothed in a soft pink silk nightdress Joanna had once bought for her in Hong Kong, which she had always declared too good to wear. Joanna looked up at the sky above the chimney; a 1920s brick chimney, slightly cottagey. The sky was a hot dark blue and the air danced a little, reminding Joanna, inappositely, of the simmering heat on the North African desert where she had sat, by the hour, in a jeep, counting the intermittent traffic,
Donald Hope”. Molly had replied that this was a matter of indifference to her. The plant, called in the event “Joanna Hope”, a deep salmonpink bloom when it came, now occupied, in various exemplars, many windowsills and whatnots about the place. Even in Molly’s own room. Joanna’s jigsaw-mother was densest at the points of medical crisis. It was during Joanna’s last African tour that her father had become finally bed-ridden. Molly had been wonderful about this for just long enough, a prop and a
still searching the fields for him, he knew when Ma-Tun’s young wife was alone with a visiting cousin and was able to tell Ma-Tun what had been spoken between them, not much, but enough; he knew, A-Oa was convinced, what had happened to her own young brother-in-law, Da-Shi, who had gone away one night, leaving no message, a year or so after his brother, A-Oa’s husband, had been taken by the army. Kun divulged such knowledge reluctantly and with many cautions. He advised against haste when there
intrigue and anxiety both clearly. He drew her attention to the huge wrought-iron handles of the keys. “We are out of the nineteenth century entirely,” he said. The walls of the salone were furnished with a series of portraits, silver-wigged and dark-eyed and rigid. Joshua’s bedroom had a fearful and appalling painting of fruits and flowers so arranged as to form a kind of human form, bristling with pineapple spines, curvaceous with melons, staring through passionflower eyes. “That,” said