Chasm [Hardcover]

Dorothea Tanning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2004

A Surrealist novel in the vein of Angela Carter, about love and beauty and dark secrets. Played out like the command of an oracle are the events that stain one night in the improbable setting of this desert tale. Rearing its impudent architecture like insult on a landscape of quiet beauty is Windcote, "its very name a masquerade," where inhabitants and guests find themselves driven by obsessions and confusions they have never faced before. Here doors open and close and open again. They hide, release, reveal, and ruin. In this web of tangled imperatives is the child, Destina, untouched by the fevers and failures around her. Her own world is outside in the mystery-locked canyon where, for the time of this story, she seems to find her own truth

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dorothea Tanning was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1910 and moved to New York in the 1940s where she met and married Max Ernst. There she became known for her very personal and powerful surrealist paintings. Her work is included in collections at the Tate Gallery, the Georges Pompiou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Collection, Houston. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; First edition. edition (October 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585675849
• ISBN-13: 978-1585675845
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,263,990 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Supernatural Earth Mothers, December 6, 2004

By 

Lee Armstrong (Winterville, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chasm (Hardcover)

One doesn't often have their first novel published at age 94. Dorothea Tanning has published as a poet & a memoir volume as well as being recognized as a painter & sculptor. As far as I know, this would be her first novel. "Chasm: A Weekend" is a kind of modern gothic tale, mostly set in the desert of the Southwest United States.

Tanning's prose is as picturesque as we might imagine one known as a painter might write. Her words paint detailed specific images that for me tended to bog down the unfolding of the story. The history that began the tale showed a long line of females all named Destina, all with kind of supernatural earth mother senses, many of whom lived short or unhappy lives. Raoul Meridian has apparently inherited the estate of Windcote from one of said Destinas and built it into a spooky gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere. He is a bizarre figure, eccentric in dress and scientific interests, who enjoys hedonistic worldly pleasures at the expense of much actual human intimacy. Meridian enjoys inviting people to his estate for weekend parties where he prefers the attentions of his female guests. His former wife's orphaned granddaughter is another Destina who lives a bizarre existence in an upper floor of the mansion attended to by Nelly, a strange dimwitted refugee from some institutional care setting. Destina at age 7 enjoys a special relationship with a mountain lion who brings her trophies of various animal body parts that she keeps closely guarded. Albert & Nadine are two of the guests who swirl into the party. Albert Exodus befriends Destina while Nadine fascinates Meridian.

The novel takes a while to get going, bringing in party guests that apparently are there for some reason, although one is never quite sure why other than to create a sense of mystery that is never explained. As the novels builds to its raging violent climax, Tanning is at her best in these action sequences that gnaw and tear. However, at the end, I didn't really like any of the characters including Destina's great grandmother called the Baroness, nor did I particularly care about the outcome. There is a certain sense of gothic strangeness that Tanning creates, but as whole, "Chasm: A Weekend" left me suspended somewhere between boredom, confusion and wondering if there were a point. Taxi!