A Whistling Woman

by A.S. Byatt

Book Overview

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession delivers a brilliant and thought-provoking novel about the 1960s and how the psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism of the times affected ordinary lives.

"Rich, acerbic, wise.... [Byatt] tackles nothing less than what it means to be human." --Vogue

Frederica Potter, a smart, spirited 33-year-old single mother, lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679776907
• ISBN13: 9780679776901
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Skill in Portraying Difficult Things

Chapter 11 juxtaposes two episodes, first a seduction and then the same woman having sex with a proper boyfriend. The treatment, while blandly descriptive, is so brutally, bitterly true that you have to ask yourself if we can afford so much truth in a civilized world. Another tremendous achievement on Byatt's part.

fabulous

This book is almost as good as her book, Possession, which I thought was one of the most brilliant books I'd ever read.

Excellent conclusion to the series!

I loved reading about the philosophical and intellectual musings of the Porter family in The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower and had looked forward to reading A Whistling Woman. I know that this is the final installment in this wonderful series and I held out on reading it because I had wanted to savor these wonderful offerings for as long as I could. A Whistling Woman is one interesting and enthralling novel! Set in London during the late 1960s, this fourth novel centers mostly on Federica Potter's chic talk show and its various topics on literature, politics, feminism, among other things. The novel also introduces a plethora of new characters and their various intellectual insights and findings. There are various twists throughout the novel as Federica once again regales us with her strong, feminist views. This novel, unlike the previous three, had a slow start for me. It also came across as too bloated with all of those new characters and topics. But A.S. Byatt pulled it off well and the novel became riveting afterwards. I particularly loved how the topic of how the human brain was made for the body instead for reason had been delved into with so many thought-provoking views and personal philosophies. I could get into so many subjects this novel got into-but I am afraid of spoiling it for the potential reader. This is the sort of book that you read and then discuss with a group of friends or fellow bibliophiles. The final chapter of this enlightening quartet did not disappoint me. I will miss Federica and the rest of the Potter family. My only hope is that A.S. Byatt continues to deliver wonderful books in the future.

Wow

While reading A Whistling Woman, I kept wishing that more novelists wrote as well, as wonderfully, as A.S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman is a terrific novel, in my opinion almost as good as her phenomenal Possession. The story of Frederica Potter comes to a close (at least for us readers) at the end of the novel, and what a story it is--not for plotting reasons, but for how it is told. A Whistling Woman is an intelligently written, thoughtful and thought provoking novel of ideas focusing on one woman, Frederica, and a number of others who touch her life. Byatt shifts back and forth between plot lines and characters in a manner similar to Iris Murdoch. Like Murdoch, Byatt draws heavily from philisophical learning. All of the characters are highly intelligent and not afraid to show it. This is a wonderful, wonderful novel--one of the best I have read in quite some time. Enjoy!

Laminations

This book is so much bigger than the pages it encompasses. Yes, it has a weak narrative arc compared with more popular fiction but the layers of metaphor and meaning enrich the story while the ending leaves all things possible. One word defines the core of this book. A word I had not heard before and one I looked up in the dictionary - Syzygy. This word means both "opposition" and "conjunction," and this is what this novel is all about. Opposite schools of thought and scholarly disciplines are seen to be in conjunction when discussed on Fredrica's TV show, the anti-university tries to be opposite to the real university but remains in conjunction in a weird way - it cannot survive as an anti-university without a university, the Ottaker Twins are in a strange syzygy dance throughout the novel and end up scarred by the same experience. Apart from this idea of conjunction and opposition, which I guess defined a lot of the sixties, there are many other wonderful literary games in the book. Fredrica's search for the meaning of metaphor plays a small but important part in our understanding of the whole while Bill Potter's epiphany about art is a fascinating place for this curmudgeon character to end up at. Philosophy is pitted against psychology, science against symbolism and love against destruction and everything ends up being linked at the end of the day. This is my favorite of the Fredrica books as I believe that A.S. Byatt has achieved more clarity here than ever before - or maybe I'm just getting it better!