The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt

The narrator, Phineas G. Nanson, is doing grad study in English literature (sometime in the 90s) and becomes disenchanted with the abstractions of literary theory, wanting something more thing-y to study, more real. An advisor recommends that Phineas investigate Scholes Destry-Scholes, magisterial biographer of a 17th-century explorer/scientist/diplomat.

Destry-Scholes, Phineas discovers, had written some biographical fragments--not all factual--of three different historical figures. Threads woven throughout include travel, exploration, natural history, drama, doubles, polymaths, and spiritual experiences.

In trying to track down facts and things related to his subject, Phineas finds himself going down some odd pathways, taking him more and more out of the library and into thing-ness, but never far away from magic, either. Like Darwin, Phineas finds literature losing appeal in favor of the natural world and its own magic.

The connection between biography and natural history, we come to see, is the magic of sorting, arranging, classification, taxonomy, order: how meaning is both discovered and made and named. (A fascinating bit involves some beautiful glass marbles and a list of names, with endless attempts to rearrange both names and marbles in a way that makes sense.) But our systems also have real-world effects, as a passionate bee taxonomist makes Phineas understand.

I'm making the book sound too remote and intellectual, but in fact it's deeply involving, as much as Phineas tries not to make the book about himself, and often quite funny. There's a strange and wonderful episode involving a sinister customer at the travel guide shop where Phineas works, for example. I loved this book.

I also loved it because this was all right up my alley: my PhD dissertation, had I written it, was going to be about literary biography and how biographers resconstruct lives, and bodies of work, in terms of literary genres like comedy, tragedy, farce, and so on. Byatt provides tons to chew on in considering the biographer's art, and the chewing is delicious.