Les Femmes Fatale

A S Byatt is not everyone's cup of tea and certainly no longer fashionable today, but I still like her books - very academic and loquacious and brimming with ideas. More than Possession, her award winning book, I like her Virgin in the Garden series. She plays with words - she makes me want to read aloud her writing and sometimes I do, scaring the bejesus out of my grandmother who will have just nodded off at that particular instant (we share a room now...sigh). I like words, I like etymology, I like rolling words under my tongue, I like seeing printed words on a page, I like typing words out. Is this why people have blogs? Byatt's quartet of books is perhaps not as compelling as The Alexandria Quartet, but it's closer to my heart. It's ridiculous though, this what I'm doing, comparing completely dissimilar series with each other, merely because they co-relate numerically.
The life of this lady has interested me always. And Zadie Smith writes incandescently I think. Women inspire me always - Eunice de Souza is splendid and not only because she taught me. She was splendid - an excellent teacher and an excellent poet. There are few teachers who can call their students 'cabbages' and still have them eating out of their hands.
Possession was translated onto the big screen. I never saw but I don't think I missed anything because it had Gwyneth Paltrow who recently essayed the part of Sylvia Plath in Sylvia and mangled the role and also because very few lovely books translate well to Hollywood potboiling sort of films. The only one I truly loved was The Hours. And that book was written by a man and a very splendid sort of man too. Although of course, not as splendid as Eunice de Souza.