Ragnarök, The End of the Gods

A. S. Byatt gelangte mit ihrem Roman "Besessen", der 1990 mit dem Booker-Preis ausgezeichnet wurde, zu Weltruhm. Ihr Werk umfasst neun Romane, zahlreiche Erzählungen und literaturkritische Texte; für ihr Schaffen wurde sie vielfach ausgezeichnet und 1999 von der Queen zur Dame Commander of the British Empire ernannt. A. S. Byatt kam 1936 in Yorkshire zur Welt, hat drei Töchter und lebt in London.

* Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jeweled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in Sunday Telegraph * Byatt paints beautiful and fantastic word-pictures, glittering verbal special effects -- Allan Massie Scotsman * Colour and sensation flood Byatt's writing ... One of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation. Independent * Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats [the gods] with dignity...Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book -- M. John Harrison Guardian * Thanks to a rare fusion of imagination and intellect, sensual poetry and cerebral prose, youthful joy and elderly wisdom [,Byatt has made]...an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods? -- Peter Conrad Observer * Byatt peels back the cover of the book that the girl reads and takes us deep inside it as she delights in reimagining the twilight of the gods and the destruction of the world. ... Like Wagner before her, [she] dares to dream how the world might end ... this rewriting of the Ragnarok is a story for our time of overpopulation and anthropomorphic climate change, and of all time Financial Times * Surely among the most beautiful and incisive [pages] Byatt has ever written Independent * Byatt's retelling of Ragnarok is permeated with the loving familiarity of long acquaintance. Her language is lapidary. The terrible archness that can infest the narratives of sophisticated writers who attempt to master myth is resoundingly absent. ... It is pleasant to imagine some lonely, bookish child discovering it and becoming entranced -- Jane Shilling Evening Standard * A brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal rendition of the Scandinavian mythology...a gorgeous enrichment and interpretation -- Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Review * Byatt's writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful Telegraph * Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush