The Means of Escape--Penelope Fitzgerald
This book of short stories is introduced by A.S. Byatt who is replete with fulsome praise of Penelope Fitzgerald. My only other encounter with Ms. Fitzgerald's work was The Blue Flower , a novel about Novalis, which won the National Book Award. I do not recall being impressed with it, and in fact recall struggling through it. So too with this book of short stories. I would often finish a story and wonder, "What the heck was that all about?" Stories just seemed to stop without resolution. And if there had been some deep and compelling beauty in the language, some deft touch, some startling revelation, some insight granted me through reading them, then I would be all right with a certain amount of confusion--after all, I can't claim to have a complete understanding of Ulysses , and yet I love the book. I read in Ms. Byatt's introduction about the moral astuteness and adeptness of the stories, and I was led to wonder, yet once again, what exactly does mora...