The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature) - Softcover

Ducornet, Rikki

4.15

204 ratings by Goodreads

9781564781550: The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564781550 ISBN 13: 9781564781550

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2015

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"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind."

Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas who, as a result of witnessing his mother's murder, falls into a decades-long coma. Awakened in a seaport town in France, he reconstructs his past through storytelling and myth, resulting in an astonishing exploration of memory and imagination.

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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.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a richly imagined, often Rabelaisian journey through dreams and the past, novelist/illustrator Ducornet in this, the third in her projected ``tetralogy of elements'' (The Stain, The Entering Fire), explores memory and being. Sleeping through two world wars in the spa run by the renowned psychoanalyst Dr. Venus Kaiserstiege (or K), Nicholas--the Sandman of the case study The Fountains of Neptune--awakens to a very different world. As he tends the now-rundown spa, Nicholas tries to ``put order to my memories, disentangling reality from dreams and Heaven from Hell. These days I do nothing but attempt to interpret those enigmatic wheels, those churning shadows, those cries beyond cries; the story beneath all stories: my own.'' He recalls his childhood in a small seaside French town, the fantastic tales that old sailors told him, and the hints that his parents' deaths were not accidental. The Sandman's big sleep began when, at the age of nine on a visit to a riverside village, he accidentally fell into the water and nearly drowned. The accident, K suggests, was precipitated by his increasing awareness of the fatal romantic triangle in which his parents were involved. His recovery, a febrile re-creation of a lost childhood, is interspersed with essay-like letters to and from K, on a book tour in the US. K dies soon after her return, and the Sandman is left ``to dwell in animated quietude'' and to reflect. Interested only in the ``allusive messages'' of his dreams, he feels that he ``is very like the floating monster both of the world and not of the world-- as long as I can hold fast the glass wand of reverie--somehow eternal.'' Vivid characters and remarkable writing, but while most of the parts are good, there is something in the sum that echoes old ideas and stories. Interesting if flawed. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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