Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt

Possession is one of those books that I know I should read. It's literary. Smart people speak highly of this book. At cocktail parties frequented by beautiful literati, people discuss Byatt's plot points delivered in beautiful lyricism.  At least this is how I've always thought of Possession. Unfortunately, I've never made it all the way through the book. A fact that has always exiled me from the literati society in my own mind.

I did, however, make it through Ragnarok which is told with Byatt's signature lyricism but is much shorter than Possession. Byatt truly is a beautiful wordsmith. She can write about something awful with such entrancing beauty that only afterward do I realize what I read. For example, when describing Jormungandr:

She swam on, meeting miles of floating jellyfish, pulsing glassy umbrellas, trailing fine poisonous filaments, all of which she sucked in, indiscriminate. The poison did her no harm. But it collected in sacs behind her fangs; it ran like quicksilver in her blood. She spat her venom into the eyes of porpoises and monk seals. blinding them, swallowing them, spitting out undigested stuff which sank slowly and swayed in the currents.

See? Gorgeous and awful.

And that's the problem, I think. It's one of those cases where the artistry distracts from the story. I spend so much of my attention on the flow of language that I loose track of meaning. Even though Ragnarok is short and told in a straight forward manner (almost autobiographical in a way), I had to back up and restart several times.

It is, perhaps, the most beautiful thing I've read so far this year.