The Shadow of the Sun

Author: A.S.Byatt

Genre: Identity, Melancholia

Summary: Anna is eighteen, and she has no idea what she is supposed to do with her life. Her father Henry is a literary genius, and being impossibly aware of how she can never be as great as he is, she is afraid to even try, forever in his shadow, her life being organized around his by her mother, Caroline, for as long as she can remember.

The story starts one summer, where Anna is home, after being expelled from school because she ran away. She is not doing anything, just being, while her mother doesn't understand her, and minds her too much, while her father, being a literary genius, doesn't mine her at all. (As Oliver tells Henry later, "struggling under Caroline's care and [Henry's] lack of it.")

Caroline invites one of Henry's most prominent critics, Oliver and his wife Marget to spend the summer with them, and that results in a catalyst of events, not directly, but it's a beginning for them, in which Anna struggles with her self and society to try to attain an identity for herself, find something to do, a purpose, something to channel herself into.

Review: This book, has an amazing impact. It's about growing up in fits of depression and melancholy and the need to find something that you're good at, while you have no idea how to, and you're scared that maybe there is a possibility you might not be good at anything. The feeling isn't a good feeling, and the way it's written here, brings it to focus, sharpens it, and shows the pain, the suffering, with such clarity it is almost frightening. But it's also a way of confronting your inner demons, I think, staring them in the face, and was quite an eye opener for me.

The language in the book is quite gorgeous. The descriptions are vivid and fanciful, a wonderful exercise for the imagination, it's such a strangely familiar perspective of the world. The way Henry sees things, which he uses later to shape into his novels, is awe-inspiring, a man in relation to his surroundings in such a way that you see it all and you imagine it all, and think that this is what the inside of a mind of a genius looks like. Anna also has her father's genius, but she also has some of her mothers practicality, and her own awkwardness, and other characteristics which somehow convey themselves, in words that she speaks and paragraphs of what she sees.

Although this book was published in 1964, it somehow fits with the current society, the current problems (perhaps they are age-old problems), and still manages to have enough impact, enough material, to make it very real.

To me, what actually happens in this book is less important, in relation to how it happens and how the characters see it. All the characters, are somehow very real and vivid, and important, yet significantly insignificant compared to all that's happening around them and the bigger picture, and Anne, whom the story centers on, although I suppose she herself can't tell why, which is exactly the issue the story brings across. I can't rate it a full ten, coz I disagree with some of the things that happen in the book, it seems a bit too.. I don't know, I don't want to agree with it, although I suppose they were indeed very relevant. And I cannot declare that I love the book, because it seems to understand things a little too well, and... I really don't know quite how to put this. The book, is just amazing.

Rating: 8/10

Quotes:

If I went away and lived my own life, she thought, I might manage to be everything I am, or have to be - and then I might see and not only remember having seen.

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Note: I've been dying to read her Possession: A Romance, for ages now, but I only managed to get my hands on an ebook. Considering my aversion to ebooks, it's been left unread on my hard drive for a long time. Recently I stumbled across this in the school library, and knew I had to read it, specially since it's apparently A.S.Byatt's first book. Now that I've read some of her work, it seems I am going to have choice but tackle the ebook sometime soon. ^_~