THE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE is a tough read. Even though A.S. Byatt has made a fine literary career setting up stories about the men and women who choose a life of the mind over a life of physical pleasures, it is difficult to digest all the intricacies of the gray matters chronicled here.

This particular tale concerns one Phineas G. Nanson, who has decided that the day-in, day-out happenings in his ongoing postmodern literary theory career have become boring. Instead, he rails to the universe that he will now simply Joe Friday himself into working only with "facts" --- so he spends days mining the life of Victorian traveler, writer, and diplomat Elmer Bole, only to decide that he is destined to write a biography of Bole's own biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes.

The man behind the man, the biographer behind the biography, is a distinctly significant choice for him. Sure, ideas are not facts, and the dogged determination that he shows in pursuing his new subject matter is admirable, but things don't quite go according to Nanson's tidy little plan.

In the real world, Nanson must make some money while he pursues the biographer and the biographer's tales, which are numerous. While fulfilling the hackneyed duties of a travel agent and linking up with a Fulla --- an eccentric bee taxonomist (okay, who doesn't have to look this one up?) --- from Sweden, he spends considerable time putting Destry-Scholes' notes and notecards into some strange order, alternating hitting upon some important elements of the man's life and watching them disappear.

There were mamy moments when I wanted to grab a copy of Stephen King's DREAMCATCHER instead of reading on. Byatt is an intellectual, no bones about it, and the endless stream of big words and fancy phraseology can cause some wear and tear on the general reader. This is the kind of book that requires you to spend a lot of time turning back pages, making sure that you really understood what was just said, maybe even taking a break to look up some esoteric word in the dictionary.

When I was an English major in college, I enjoyed this kind of tough read. At this point in my life, it's a little harder to find pleasure and enjoyment in a read this difficult. However, since Byatt's other books have often entertained me, I did keep going. In the end, I found THE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE an intricately woven tale. It won't catch the fancy of all readers, but if you stay with it, you will feel as if you have scaled some low-level mountain that gives you some satisfaction.

  --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano