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Madeleine Is Sleeping (Harvest Book), by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
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When a girl falls into a deep and impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer stumbles into the role of pornographer; a beautiful young wife grows to resemble her husband's viol. And in their midst travels Madeleine, the dreamer, who is trying to make sense of her own metamorphosis as she leaves home, joins a gypsy circus, and falls into an unexpected triangle of desire and love.
An extraordinary debut, Madeleine Is Sleeping received jubilant critical acclaim and was honored with a National Book Award nomination. Part fairy tale, part coming-of-age story, this "dream of a book" (Michael Cunningham) is an adventure in the discovery of art, sexuality, community, and the self.
- Sales Rank: #270583 in Books
- Brand: Bynum, Sarah Shun-Lien
- Published on: 2005-11-01
- Released on: 2005-11-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .76" w x 5.31" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 276 pages
From Publishers Weekly
An immensely obese woman who sprouts two magnificent pairs of wings, a lonely housewife who grows strings to match her husband's viol and a lascivious, wealthy widow are just a few of the fantastical characters who populate the enchanting world of Bynum's debut. Written in brief, dreamy segments (appropriately enough, since the title character has fallen into a Sleeping Beauty–like slumber), the book alternates deftly between reality and illusion as it follows Madeleine down a path of sexual, artistic and personal discovery. In a perverse revisitation of Ludwig Bemelmans's classic children's books, Madeleine, exiled to a Parisian convent from her pastoral French home after committing a rather scientific sex act with the village idiot, joins a band of gypsies who wind up performing for a widow with a love of photography and a penchant for the pornographic. As Madeleine grows entwined in an intensely erotic love triangle with the "flatulent man," M. Pujol, and Adrien, the photographer assigned to document the widow's grotesquely arranged tableaux, life at home grows worse for the family holding vigil over her as she sleeps. The book culminates in a masterful merge between Madeleine's waking life and her dreams, making it impossible to discern whether reality ever existed in Bynum's imaginative tale. Replete with Kafkaesque metamorphoses, Freudian fantasies, Aesopian justice and religious metaphor, the novel is equal parts fairy tale, fable, romance and bildungsroman. At times, the allegorical allusions grow predictable, and some readers may be put off by the constant shifts and uncertainty between fact and fiction. Others looking for a challenging, unusual read will be thrilled by the imagination and mysterious energy that haunt this remarkable debut.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
PRAISE FOR MADELEINE IS SLEEPING
"Bynum's lush, poetic imagery is full of vivid, sensuous details one can almost smell, taste, and feel . . . Achingly human and poignantly telling."--The Boston Globe
"Hypnotic . . . A small, enchanting novel that appeals to the naughty, insolent child in each of us."--USA Today
"Bynum's voice is vivid, her use of language incisive and surprising."
(BookForum 2004-11-01)
"A luminous debut novel..powerful and hauntingly elusive"
(Boston Globe 2004-12-20)
"Like a dream, this novel fills the mind with tantalizing ambiguity, haunting images, and innocent longings that are slow to fade."
(Christian Science Monitor 2004-10-26)
"Extravagantly imagined...a fantasy influenced by writers from Ludwig Bemelmans to Angela Carter"
(New York Times 2004-11-11)
"Bynum's boldly original first novel is an allegory of adolescence...every page offers something original."
(People 2004-09-20)
"A magical tale"
(Time Out New York 2004-10-16)
"Masterful...a voice at once sensuous and humorous, mellifluous and matter-of-fact"
(Washington Post Book World 2004-10-03)
Review
PRAISE FOR MADELEINE IS SLEEPING
"Bynum's lush, poetic imagery is full of vivid, sensuous details one can almost smell, taste, and feel . . . Achingly human and poignantly telling."--The Boston Globe
"Hypnotic . . . A small, enchanting novel that appeals to the naughty, insolent child in each of us."--USA Today
(20041220)
"Bynum's voice is vivid, her use of language incisive and surprising." (BookForum 20041026)
"A luminous debut novel..powerful and hauntingly elusive" (Boston Globe 20041111)
"Like a dream, this novel fills the mind with tantalizing ambiguity, haunting images, and innocent longings that are slow to fade." (Christian Science Monitor 20040920)
"Extravagantly imagined...a fantasy influenced by writers from Ludwig Bemelmans to Angela Carter" (New York Times 20041016)
"Bynum's boldly original first novel is an allegory of adolescence...every page offers something original." (People 20041003)
"A magical tale" (Time Out New York )
"Masterful...a voice at once sensuous and humorous, mellifluous and matter-of-fact" (Washington Post Book World )
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Angela Carter meets Choose Your Own Adventure
By Maggie Smith
This book is irresistable. The prose poem-like chapters thread through a carnival of characters and settings, leading you from one strange and beautiful world to another. The language is stunning; the story is part fairy tale, part historical fiction, part surreal tableau.
As a book seller, I see hundreds of new novels every year, many of which are well-written, innovative, and lovely, but this is one of those rare gems--a story so perfect in its peculiarity, so delightful in its turns--that you feel you have been given a gift of something you didn't even know you wanted until it was there in your hands.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
"What terrible things we do in our effort to be admired."
By Mary Whipple
In this strange and often beautiful novel in which reality and fantasy overlap, Madeleine, a young girl, reclines romantically in what appears to be a permanent state of sleep, with her family and neighbors all tiptoeing around her. Her mind, however, is active, creating a bizarre dream world in which she lives out a series of adolescent fantasies, exploring who she is, what kind of adult will she become, what her role in life may be, what makes her unique, and how her sexual fantasies might be fulfilled.
Unique characters appear in her dreams--an immensely fat woman (Mathilde, Madame Cochon) who has two pairs of wings, a girl who has a stringed body which she can play like a viol, a man who creates the sounds of the nightingale and the cuckoo with his flatulence, a "half-wit" who exposes himself to children, an opera singer dethroned by a castrato, and a photographer in a mental institution, along with Madeleine's real-life family. The "action," real and imagined, ranges from a gypsy circus, where Madeleine studies tumbling, to the home of a widow, where the strangely gifted circus performers act out tableaux vivants, and eventually to a mental hospital, before returning to Madeleine's family and home in rural France.
As in our own dreams, strange connections occur among the characters. Madeleine, at one point, becomes the Madeleine from the children's stories about a Parisian convent school, her real-life brothers and sisters appear in the mental hospital dream sequence, and she engages in a love triangle, which becomes a literary joke when the author tries to figure out how to conclude the love story of three characters. Irony takes on new meaning in a book that is itself so out-of-the-ordinary, and the humor is both broad and dark as Madeleine's dreams constantly juxtapose unlikely elements.
The "action," while intriguing on a psychological, dream-like level, sometimes leaves the reader feeling starved for connections to reality, however, and the novel is often self-conscious. Though most readers will see some parallels between action within the dreams and the fantasies of typical adolescents, many will also find it difficult to identify with the cartoonish characters on a personal level or to care much about what happens to them. Art and creativity are strong themes in what passes for the plot, and the conclusion re-emphasizes this theme. Fascinating and often beautifully poetic, the novel ultimately feels like a literary exercise, containing some universal elements of reality, but distanced from the reader. Mary Whipple
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Resting Reverie
By Making Good Stories
Comas: a horror for those forced to see their loved one in that state and an intriguing in-between state for those in the coma. Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum presents the blur between the worlds of the sleeping and the waking.
In sleep, the borders between reality and dreams blurs for Madeleine and her family in provincial France. With images of a fat woman flying with her arm flaps and a girl made entirely of pastry kissed by a hopeful suitor, the difference between fanciful dreams and the real world blends to the point of it being difficult to discern what is actually real, yet the changes Madeleine goes through is still reflective of transformations that people go through when they grow up and experience the world.
Presented in a more unique format with verse length chapters over typical prose length chapters, the story offers a visual draw into the narrative. The worlds that are built between the dream and reality are adequately developed with the aid of magic realism, but it could have used a bit more clarity on what was going on, particularly as the ending was a bit of a "WTF" moment; however, there were parallels decently drawn between the events of the dream and the events occurring in reality.
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