Word: babel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dressler is an urban fable about civilization and its discontents, the repression of instincts in the service of progress. Yet this commercial hero also represents a period of social history when ambition and new wealth outstripped utility and taste. Dressler's Grand Cosmo, an architectural and cultural Tower of Babel, is part residence and part theme park. Within its 30 stories and two subterranean levels are a beach, a lake, a model New England village, a Moorish bazaar and a simulated asylum for the insane. Criticized as an example of "the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism," Dressler's folly...
Possession is by far A.S. Byatt's best-known novel. A miraculous blend of contemporary and Victorian morality and romance, it won the 1990 Booker Prize in Britain just as it was being published in the U.S. to glowing reviews and warm sales. Babel Tower (Random House; 625 pages; $25.95) is Byatt's first novel since then, and will surely attract the attention of all those enchanted by Possession. It is also likely to provoke some head scratching, since the new novel continues a story begun in two of Byatt's earlier, pre-Possession books...
...that it's necessary to have read The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life to pick up on the action and characters of Babel Tower. Still, the opening pages suggest that a lot has gone on before anything here begins...
...novel, the appearance of a strange, semipornographic novel, Babbletower, about a group of escapees from the French Revolution who try to form an ideal community and lapse instead into an orgy of violence and torture. Chapters of the novel are interspersed throughout the first half or so of Babel Tower, and when the thing is finally published, with the helping hand of Frederica, the government decides to prosecute it under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. And yet a third narrative follows the members of a government committee as they travel to various schools in order to file a report...
...nothing else, Babel Tower suggests a reason that not very much thrilling fiction has been written about the workings of education committees. Byatt's interests here are more philological than dramatic. All her various plots underscore the mixed blessings of language, its power to obscure as well as reveal, to enslave as well as liberate. The subject is certainly worthy but not perhaps sufficiently vivid to propel readers through a long, long literary haul. Byatt writes beautifully, and passages of this novel come to brilliant life. But the net effect of the whole, as opposed to the parts, seems...