Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice

Daily Telegraph

A weighty intellect is at play in a new collection of short stories... Sensuous.... They are suffused with a sensuous frivolity normally held in check in her longer fictions.

Fernanda Eberstadt

The disjunction between...art's wide enchantment and a snobbish parochialism, is central to Byatt's writing....Elementals is...full of light and life, the throwaway gleams of a writer at the height of her powers. —The New York Times Book Review

The Independent

Opening Elementals, it's the reader who can feel given a prize when such an eminently enjoyable and readable book comes her way. Part of Byatt's gift as a short-story writer is her obvious relish of the form. As you read, you feel what a good time she is having, how she is just letting herself dive in and play....The hedonist, art-lover and poet in her take center stage.

Times Literary Supplement

Intriguing....A beguiling vision....Colour, shape, texture, shine and the very chemical composition of substances are lovingly detailed in her work. At times, her descriptions are as vivid and etched as illustrations from a book of fairy tales.

Library Journal

This collection of three long stories and three brief ones by the author of, most recently, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (LJ 12/97), features her trademark fairy tale and magical elements as well as the age-old complexities of human nature. In "Crocodile Tears," while fiftyish couple Tony and Patricia Nimmo are touring a small art gallery after lunch one Sunday, he drops dead. Patricia inexplicably runs away, fleeing not only the scene but the country. She sets herself up in a hotel in France until she can manage her shock and grief. "Cold" is truly a fairy tale: a young princess who, legend has it, is descended from an ice maiden, can't bear warmth and comfort. She prefers dancing naked in the snow and thus presents a challenge to the king when it comes time to find her a suitable mate. These stories create appealing worlds of fantasy and truth and should prove popular with fiction readers. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/99.]--Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

The Atlantic Monthly

[The stories] have a delightful fairy-tale quality....the reader can enjoy surprise as well as pleasure.

Fernanda Eberstadt

The disjunction between...art's wide enchantment and a snobbish parochialism, is central to Byatt's writing....Elementals is...full of light and life, the throwaway gleams of a writer at the height of her powers.
— The New York Times Book Review

Hilma Wolitzer

...[K]aleidoscopic....[T]he fairy tale is the ideal form for her gifts....[T]he longer stories, fired by a fierce intelligence and related in shimmering prose, evolve from idea to execution in unexpected and thrillingly persuasive leaps....[S]hould delight A.S. Byatt's devoted readers and attract many new ones.
— The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

Six rather arbitrarily linked stories (which allegedly explore various "extremes and polarities") from the rococo stylist whose best fiction includes Booker Prize–winning Possession (1990) and the (rather similar) story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1997). Exotic locales and almost oppressively lush imagery dominate even such slight fictions as "Baglady" (set in a vast shopping mall in the "Far East" and redolent, if not reeking, of Muriel Spark); "Jael" (which employs the biblical Apocryphal story of Jael and Sisera to explain a moody commercial artist's tendency "to rejoice in wickedness"; and "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary," a witty parable in which an insubordinate cook is taught by a young artist to cherish even the evanescent glories of her own "Creation." More interesting, and more precisely built on defining contrasts, are the longer stories: "A Lamia in the Cevennes," about an Englishman's retirement to the French countryside to paint—and to find, in his custom-built outdoor swimming pool, aesthetic and other temptations; and (the unfortunately titled) "Crocodile Tears," about a suddenly widowed Englishwoman who escapes to the southern French city of Nimes (drenched in artifact-reminders of its past as a Roman outpost), and a transformative acquaintance with a Norwegian tourist whose burden of loss both reflects and mocks her own: it's a dizzily amusing, oddly seductive tale of cultural and psychological conflict. The best piece is "Cold," a deliciously imagined fairytale whose heroine, the beautiful princess Fiammarosa, unexpectedly departs the invigorating northern clime where she thrives to marry a prince (and expert glassblower) from abarren desert country. Her life is soon indeed imperilled, but the prince's creation of an "artificial world" magically preserves her—and their union. This is a brilliant and charming variation on its announced theme, namely that "Love changes people." An often enchanting further display of Byatt's fluent style and far-reaching imagination.