Not reviewed. Not well remembered. ( )

Three stories, each with a connection to Matisse, each one beautifully written - but the problem here is that none of the three has what you might call a memorable plot, leaving you with the feeling that this is all style and little substance. Still worth reading, especially if you delight in the way Byatt employs language, but I doubt I'll remember much of this in a year's time. ( )

A cute little hardback, only 135 pages, with reproductions of three Matisse paintings on the dust jacket, and a short story inside the book related to each of the paintings. Each story also gets a Matisse line-drawing.

In "Medusa's ankles" (Le nu rose), a middle-aged academic and her hairdresser never quite manage to communicate until the professor goes postal and smashes up the salon. "Art work" (Le silence habité des maisons, the painting on the front cover) is about a middle-class "artistic family" who have to revise some of their ideas when their invaluable cleaning-lady Mrs Brown turns out to be the real artist in the story. And finally, "The Chinese lobster" (La porte noire) brings two staff members of an art college together over a Chinese meal to discuss an allegation made against one of them by a student.

This isn't a monograph on Matisse — he is away in the background most of the time, although the characters in the stories are often influenced by his ideas and by the beauty and clarity of his notions of colour. It is, though, largely about women as makers of visual art and as represented in it, especially in "Art work" where we see the comic contrast between Debbie and Robin's family, where Debbie has long-since given up her art-school dreams and taken a paying job in journalism to support her husband's largely arid and unproductive experiments with colour, with Mrs Brown, creating powerful feminist artworks on her knitting machine and from the cast-offs she gets from her middle-class employers. But all done with Byatt's normal ironic twinkle in the eye... ( )

My glibly tossed five stars register an exquisite afternoon as much as this collection of three jewels from Dame Byatt. All three caught me unexpected. Medusa's Ankle's recalled the lead story in [b:Pulse|8608089|Pulse|Julian Barnes|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329249410s/8608089.jpg|13478360] by Julian Barnes, though I could be mistaken, perhaps I am thinking of [b:The Lemon Table|37585|The Lemon Table|Julian Barnes|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348544886s/37585.jpg|1933757]. Oh well the self-awareness was piercing. Art Work is brillaintly realized work, one which may have been a marvelous novel. The Chinese Lobster likewise was transportive, though it was more whispered verse than anything monumental. ( )

These were not stories about Matisse but about several of his paintings and how they evoke certain feelings, emotions and reactions from the characters in each story.
I felt they were of uneven quality:
"Medusa's ankles: a woman has her hair done in an exclusive salon wherein hangs one of Matisse 's paintings, "The pink nude", which is a focal point of the décor. Then we see the woman's extreme reaction to the dull, lifeless renovation of the shop and the owner's reaction to her actions. 3 stars
"Art work": From a great description of "Silence lives in houses" the author presents an artistic family and their unusual housekeeper, who turns out to be more than what she seems. This was easily my favorite. 4 stars
"The Chinese lobster": Discussion between a Dean and Professor in a Chinese restaurant over lunch about a graduate student and about Matisse, the subject of the student's work. 2 stars

Strong points were Byatt's vivid descriptions and her spot-on banal dialogue. I had to read these as I love Matisse's work. ( )