Items related to The Dreaming Girl
Synopsis
Fiction. Introduction by Luisa Valenzuela. A young American traveler in Belize has a brief affair with a man known only as the German. In THE DREAMING GIRL, Roberta Allen's exquisite and incantatory language slyly manifests how reality may be bent and blurred by desires hidden even to ourselves. "[A] literary descendant of Duras, Allen places her unnamed narrator in an exotic Central American limbo that propels her mind into a mesmerizing state somewhere between memory and fantasy"—Ken Foster, The Village Voice. "A choral work where there are endless variations on the same theme, each beautifully developed... The girl's jungle is not some Henri Rousseau sketch conjured second-hand after an afternoon spent at the Jardin de Plants. Rather it has the precision of field notes written by a solipsistic ecologist"—Mary Mackey, The American Book Review. "Roberta Allen transmits the pain and compensating strangeness of living in vignettes as urgent and enigmatic as telegrams"—John Ashbery.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including two collections of short fiction, The Traveling Woman (Vehicle Editions, 1986) and CERTAIN PEOPLE (Coffee House Press, 2007); a novella in short short stories, THE DAUGHTER (Autonomedia, 1992); a memoir, AMAZON DREAM (City Lights Publishers, 1992); the novel THE DREAMING GIRL (Painted Leaf Press, 2000, and Ellipsis Press, 2011); and several writing guides. Allen was on the faculty of The New School for many years and has also taught at Columbia University. She was a Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction in 1998. An established visual artist, she has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From Publishers Weekly
For some middle-class Westerners, traveling to exotic places can be a kind of release from everyday life and its attachments, a space out of real time to dream and act impulsively. Allen (Amazon Dream; The Daughter) captures this state well in her slight, poetic novel, in which the reader enters the consciousness of an unnamed girl traveling in Belize. The girl falls in love with a man she calls only "the German," and despite some resistance on his part, follows him from rain forest to town and back again. The dream state is conjured by Allen's almost incantatory prose style: a progression of short paragraphs, each one composed of similar short, simple sentences, most expressing the girl's feelings about her companion, their lovemaking or the jungle around them: "The girl sees a blackness before her eyes. In that blackness, she can just make out a jungle. She is alone in that jungle. She doesn't want to be alone. She looks for him. But she can't find him even though she feels his body next to hers." Allen only briefly enters the mind of the German, who has a girlfriend at home and wants to travel alone. She provides just enough concrete details about the actual landscape and people to keep the reader involved. Minor but pleasing, this dreamy prose poem may interest readers of minimalists like Gordon Lish and Lydia Davis, though Allen's work is more sentimental and less rigorous. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherEllipsis Press
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 0963753665
- ISBN 13 9780963753663
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages142
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want
