The Matisse Stories - Antonia S. Byatt [0]
The Matisse Stories
“Brilliant. … Byatt’s fiction, like Matisse’s art, pays close attention to colors and contours of surfaces, then probes beneath them to reveal further surprises.”
—Newsday
“Wonderful. … Like the best of Matisse’s works, these stories are luminous and illuminating.”
—Miami Herald
“A. S. Byatt’s three-tale sequence hits the imagination’s retina with all the vibrant splatter of an exploding paintbox. … Everywhere, scenes sizzle with chromatic intensity.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“A writer of dazzling inventiveness.”
—Time
“These stories are multi-layered … and thought-provoking. … Byatt has achieved the result she wanted—a book that is every bit as rich and sensual as a painting by Matisse.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“Exquisite triptych. … The Matisse Stories is richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people.”
—People
“Byatt exuberantly plays with the language of color, using it to establish a mood and, like a painter, to draw the reader into a carefully arranged scene.”
—L.A. Reader
BOOKS BY A. S. BYATT
FICTION
The Shadow of the Sun
The Game The Virgin in the Garden
Still Life
Sugar and Other Stories
Possession: A Romance
Angels and Insects
The Matisse Stories
Babel Tower
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
Elementals
The Biographer’s Tale
CRITICISM
Degrees of Freedom:
The Novels of Iris Murdoch
Unruly Times:
Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time
Passions of the Mind:
Selected Writings
Imagining Characters (with Ignês Sodré)
A. S. BYATT’S
The Matisse Stories
A. S. Byatt is the author of the novels Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), The Game, and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.
For Peter
Who taught me to look at things slowly.
With love.
Contents
Medusa’s Ankles
Art Work
The Chinese Lobster
Lachevelure, 1931-32
Medusa ’s Ankles
She had walked in one day because she had seen the Rosy Nude through the plate glass. That was odd, she thought, to have that lavish and complex creature stretched voluptuously above the coat rack, where one might have expected the stare, silver and supercilious or jetty and frenzied, of the model girl. They were all girls now, not women. The rosy nude was pure flat colour, but suggested mass. She had huge haunches and a monumental knee, lazily propped high. She had round breasts, contemplations of the circle, reflections on flesh and its fall.
She had asked cautiously for a cut and blow-dry. He had done her himself, the owner, Lucian of ‘Lucian’s’, slender and soft-moving, resembling a balletic Hamlet with full white sleeves and tight black trousers. The first few times she came it was the trousers she remembered, better than his face, which she saw only in the mirror behind her own, and which she felt a middle-aged disinclination to study. A woman’s relation with her hairdresser is anatomically odd. Her face meets his belt, his haunches skim her breathing, his face is far away, high and behind. His face had a closed and monkish look, rather fine, she thought, under soft, straight, dark hair, bright with health, not with added fats, or so it seemed.
‘I like your Matisse,’ she said, the first time.
He looked blank.
‘The pink nude. I love her.’
Oh, that. I saw it in a shop. I thought it went exactly with the colour-scheme I was planning.’
Their eyes met in the mirror.
‘I thought she was wonderful,’ he said. ‘So calm, so damn sure of herself, such a lovely colour, I do think, don’t you? I fell for her, absolutely. I saw her in this shop in the Charing Cross