A.S. Byatt’s Still Life
A.S. Byatt’s Still Life reads like a painting. Byatt describes a person or a scene with a list of colors, like splotches of paint, but colors so precise and visceral that you can almost taste them. When Frederica goes to the picnic by the sea, one learns that “her skin had at one stage, unusual in a redhead, been almost chocolate-brown and silk smooth, but she was northern redhead, and had passed beyond the russet and the Negro, back to a strange peeled patchwork, toast-cinder brown, radish-crimson, freckled bone and the translucent gray of flaking skin still shifting.” Toast-cinder brown is a brown I have never seen physically but can see in my mind and taste in my mouth. Toast. Cinder. The nuttiness of browned crust on the tongue. The kind of brown that can only describe human skin, salty and slightly rancid from sweat. Radish. Crimson. One knows that a red radish isn’t exactly red the way a rose or blood is red. The association of a radish to crimson makes one think of a red that is almost magenta, which is the same hue as the pink of sunburnt skin. Young skin. Fresh like the crispness of a radish.
“Freckled bone” is strangely appropriate even though we are talking about skin and not the skeleton underneath. The human bone with its tinge of ivory that can’t be compared to any other colors of the external parts of the human body. By imagining the bone, its curves and dark shadows pooling in the spaces that those curvatures make, we see the true coloring of her skin—not white, not beige, but bone. Then immediately the bony shape of her thin body. Through one carefully chosen word, we move seamlessly from color to shape.
What about the “translucent gray of flaking skin”? It’s an exaggeration. We know that flakes of skin are never completely white or opaque. Yet one does not typically think of them as being translucent or gray either. The description feels too exaggerated but the exaggeration brings us closer to what flakes of skin are like. Dingy and delicate are what flakes of skin are like. Grey and translucent fit the bill.
The novel must be read slowly in order for one to be able to fully appreciate the artistry of Byatt’s strokes. Every adjective she stacks on top of another creates a picture that is brimming with rich sensations.