Madeleine Is Sleeping (Harvest Book)

A strange trip it is through the dreams of Madeleine. Based on the myth of Sleeping Beauty, this book mixes dream and reality in a confounding stream of consciousness populated with bizarre characters. The author uses cryptic but beautiful prose to recreate a sense of the ethereal and magical in which are evoked the freaks and the sublime of yonder-year circuses. I did not really like the way sexuality was described - there was a sickly sweetness to the scenes that made them unappealing and unhealthy.
This book is definitely not for everyone and I sometimes struggled with it, since I'm not a big fan of poetry. However, I was impressed with the magical and dreamy sensation that emits from it.

An interesting experiment in style. It reminded me a bit of an Angela Carter novel done as a prose poem. On the other hand, it seemed to be rather longer than it needed to be (though it can be easily read at one sitting), and for all its surreality, it was rather predictable.

National Book finalist? Really? I've only recently noticed the presence of the National Book Award, and when I checked out the website, I realize I've read a few of the finalists and winners...and have really enjoyed them. I don't know what to make of this one.

I chose this book after reading Bynum's short story in Tin House's "Fantastic Women" issue. Plus it's, in part, about carnies, and really, who doesn't like stories about carnies? The style is creative--sort of "chapters" on just about every page--which should have equalled a quicker read, but I was surprised to find myself trudging along. It took some time to get used to the changing perspectives, and the characters never seemed fleshed out enough. I'm thinking this is possibly show more due to those short "chapters" along with some really annoying structural quirks (which it appears were entirely intentional). Like incomplete sentences. And, commas, in weird places. Normally I put a book down that bugs me this much, but I kept reading for the next oddity (of which there were many) and hoping for some revelation at the end. My hopes were left unfulfilled.

I need a little more realism now. show less

Probably a bit too whimsical for my own tastes, although I'm not even sure that whimsical is the right word for this. Bynum does a wonderful job of recreating the illogical logic of the dreamstate, but I'm not sure that I can really appreciate her motives.

Frankly, while it's probably intentional, for the most part, I just found the book confusing. The characters were little more than ideas, and the plot was too meandering to really coalesce. I feel as though the book needed one big idea (or at least, an idea bigger than a girl whose dreams and reality comingle) to bring everything together. If it was there, I missed it, amongst the flatulent performance artist, the flying fat woman, and the baked-girl-simulacrum that just wanted to show more watch two men make love. show less

If the last few books I've read have been a bit peculiar, their peculiarity pales in comparison to this one. It's written in a very spare, almost poetic prose, in very short chapters (every 25 pages or so there's a chapter that, in its entirety, is "Madeleine stirs in her sleep"). The writer blurs the boundary between reality & dreaming--so much so that I never understood whether the whole story took place in a dream, or just parts of it, or none.

This novel is what you might expect if you read Sleeping Beauty, took a hypnotic, fell asleep, and dreamed a poetic fable. It is one of the most original pieces of fiction I have read in quite some time.

I really wanted to love this one. But it didn't grab me, either emotionally or language-wise. But these things are so subjective—this book has lots of praise, so clearly it worked for some!