Complete Butcher's Tales - Hardcover

Ducornet, Rikki; Rikki, Ducomet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564780430 ISBN 13: 9781564780430

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994

Synopsis

In the fantastic tradition of Borges, Bruno Schulz, Angela Carter, and H. P. Lovecarft, here are nearly sixty unforgettable stories that ignore the confines of space and time to offer, among other times and places: a cabinet of curiosities in contemporary Cairo, an alchemical ceiling in 18th-century Naples, the hallucinatory inner worlds of psychotics, anthropomorphic planets, and an Old West ruled by necromancy. Thirty of these tales were published in a limited edition by a small Canadian publisher in 1980. This expanded, revised edition collects the complete short stories of one of the most imaginative writers of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Rikki Ducornet was born in New York and has lived in North Africa, South America, Canada and France. Her work as an illustrator first came to the attention of the Canadian book trade in 1974 with the publication of Susan Musgrave's "Gullband". In 1983, the Porcupine's Quill commissioned Rikki to illustrate an edition of Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".

Rikki is the author of three short-story collections, seven books of poetry, and seven novels, including "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition" and "The Jade Cabinet". She is also a painter whose work has been exhibited widely. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Reviews

Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark provides the epigraph; his Jabberwocky donates the title of one story, "Brillig"; and something of his creepy whimsy--mixed with a pinch of Chekhov and a hint of Rod Serling, among others--informs all 54 of these short pieces, 30 of which appeared in a limited Canadian edition in 1980. Best known for her Tetralogy of Elements novels, a series that recently concluded with The Jade Cabinet , Ducornet here offers a brilliant, refreshingly varied collection: a shoe salesman in Florida, apparently modeled on her maternal grandfather, inspires "Shoes and Shit"; a mysterious flying jade saucer that blots out the sun and presages other more vile desecrations is the subject of "The Jade Planet"; in "The Imaginary Infancy of Heinrich Schliemann," the young archeologist's father tries to determine his future through copromancy. Unhinged old women, fey children vaguely menaced and menacing pubescent girls also populate these stories, which are all told in prose of such beauty that one can't help silently mouthing the words. Fluid, studied, almost overripe, it is also intensely visual: "A mature albino ape, its heart pierced by an arrow, falls from a tropical tree. As he falls he attempts to catch the bloody ropes spouting from his breast. In truth his wound is fathomless, a mortal fracture in the body of the world."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From illustrator-author Ducornet (The Jade Cabinet, 1993, etc.), nearly 60 stories, some previously published--Iowa Review, Canadian Fiction Magazine, etc.--that resemble a vitrine stuffed with curiosities, grotesqueries, and erotic paraphernalia. Written with great verve and a tirelessly original imagination, these tales, though often quite brilliant in their evocation of an individual sensation or idea, cumulatively pall, if not exhaust. Many only a page or two long, a rare few explore more fully Ducornet's preoccupations with religious hypocrisy, sexual repression, and metamorphosis. In the ``Nipple,'' a middle-aged man whose mother has just died decides to marry but then finds all the comfort he needs in a bachelor-party gift of a baby-bottle; in ``Luggage,'' a grieving widower goes on a shopping spree, then says of his wife that ``by dying you have ripened me and deepened me, and in your own wifely and cunning way you led me to the weekend bag'' that will hold all his new purchases; and in ``Bazar,'' set in North Africa, a repressed homosexual who believes ``his life has no other object but spiritual progress'' tries to forget that he has seduced and murdered a young Arab boy. Other long stories are ``Missy'' (a psychotic little girl enacts the symbolic death of a schoolmate by eviscerating and quartering Gossey, ``a small brown, rabbittish'' toy) and ``Outer Space'' (Boo tries to foresee his disturbed mother's moods yet also lead a normal childhood). Memorable shorter tales include ``The Double''--a woman grows a companion from her own severed feet; ``Parasites''--a madman is obsessed with parasites; and ``Grace''--another woman is consoled by the memory of her hair being plaited. With their relentless emphasis on the bizarre, the nasty, and the surreal, tales that provoke and disturb--but generally remain little more than cleverly executed curiosities. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

There's little straight narrative in these 50 brief, tantalizing fictions from the daring author of The Jade Cabinet ( LJ 2/1/93), and it doesn't all work. But the best pieces are garishly vivid, splendid little nightmares. In "Max, Moleskin and Glass," a flamboyant, eccentric lesbian has herself enbalmed and encased in glass in the pose of writing a famous, unfinished sentence, thus becoming the darling of the surrealists. The title character in "The Tale of the Tattooed Woman" is so consumed by hate she bites the head off a pet canary, then lures her dog into a trap and delights in watching it bleed to death. Filled with self-loathing, she first marks herself with ink as a reminder "never to kill again." In "Haddock's Eyes," a sort of literary homage, "Borges, Uqbar's most celebrated chronicler," directs the author to an archaeological dig in quest of "early Gnostic curios." An old hag in "Desire" implores her daughter to "be kind to this moldering fruit. . . . We are all born princesses only to shrivel in the sun." An acquired taste, to be sure, but worth the effort.
- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc . , Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ducornet's newest is an astonishing accomplishment, the work of an artist who can, in the course of a paragraph, convey the impact of a much longer story; given a few pages, she packs the wallop of a novel. The Complete Butcher's Tales consists of some 60 pieces set in times and settings as varied as eighteenth-century Naples and modern Cairo. Their themes are diverse, too, and also unsettling, often psychological, and usually surreal. In one, a man grows a tumor on his neck that, in the course of time, turns into a second head that provides a companionship he had previously missed. In the next, set in Algiers' Casbah, an American spinster and a defrocked French priest discuss the nature of dreams and desire and the unexplained disappearance of the serving boy's brother, of which the story's end hints an explanation. Ducornet owes obvious literary debts (most notably to Borges, whom she acknowledges), but her writing is so compelling that in the end one hears only her own voice, senses only her own gaudily bizarre and often erotic imagination. John Shreffler

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1564780430
• ISBN 13: 9781564780430
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 162