Synopses & Reviews
"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.
Review
"Ducornet builds and layers meaning into an almost dizzying brilliant tower. Her writing is relentless, breathless and energetic." Toronto Globe and Mail
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"A richly imagined, often Rabelaisian journey through dreams and the past." Kirkus
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"In Rikki Ducornet's The Fountains of Neptune, Dalkey Archive Press once again offers U.S. readers original, imaginative, not-easy-to-categorize-but-all-the-better-for-it writing that is so often lacking in the lists of commercial publishers." The Bloomsbury Review
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"I think this novel extraordinary." Oliver Sacks
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"It is high time that the U.S. discovered one of its foremost women novelists and accorded her the recognition that the ebullient quality of her imagination deserves....Keep on tantalizing us, Rikki...please." American Book Review
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"The Fountains of Neptune is an extraordinary work of the imagination." Robert Coover
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"[The Fountains of Neptune] bristles with suggested knowledge, with seductions toward symbolic readings. The page is redolent with sensual detail. It is its own kind of dream." The Denver Post
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"A sensual and voluptuous feast...a profound work, enchanting and psychologically complex." Toronto Star
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"Ducornet has no time for realism, preferring instead an incredibly pungent, heady and violent brew of words, packed with every maritime image imaginable, in which each sensation seems to be multiplied threefold and each character is ten times larger than life." London Review of Books
Review
"A book saturated with seawater and myth, a novel rippling with the underwater life of the unconscious, of the bawdy, the drunk and the uninitiated." Harvard Review
Synopsis
"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.