When Mimi discovered an unconscious bag lady huddled behind a London cinema, a sense of duty prompted her to call an ambulance. Later, she wondered if the tramp, who could have been anybody, might not be somebody after all. Could she be her abandoning mother? Or Bella, a bomb-blast victim?
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Jenny Diski's memoir, Skating to Antarctica, offered a painful portrait of a childhood beset by parental abuse and abandonment. The Dream Mistress covers similar territory, but in this case, fiction in some ways proves more disturbing than real life. Mimi is a narcoleptic dressmaker, Bella a mentally unstable street person. Their lives intersect briefly when Mimi finds an unconscious Bella in a back alley and calls an ambulance. Though the two won't meet again, it soon becomes apparent as the novel switches back and forth between them that they are more closely connected than either knows.
Diski juxtaposes the understated terror of Bella's slow disintegration with the almost dreamlike detachment of Mimi's emotionally vacant life. Though it's clear from the start just how these two women are connected, the author doesn't overplay it, choosing, instead, subtle parallels in their lives--Bella entering the church as a nun with faith but without belief eerily resonates with Mimi's illicit affair that is at once passionate yet loveless. There's a great deal of graphic sex that is more disturbing than erotic, and Diski doesn't pull her punches when it comes to describing madness, homelessness, or the often brutal relations between men and women. The Dream Mistress is an undeniably intelligent novel, if a chilly one; a book that is easier to admire than to love. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The simultaneous search for separation and connection mark the conflicted characters' plight in British author Diski's (The Dream Mistress) evocatively textured eighth novel. One night in Camden Town, 46-year-old Mimi stumbles over a filthy homeless woman for whom she calls an ambulance. On a whim, she names the woman Bella. Eventually, Mimi wonders if this could be her own mother, Leah, who abandoned Mimi in deep distress over her husband's desertion. Mimi, a seamstress whose patterns defy design and "whose momentum is inertia," has had it with her lover Jack, "a motivational capitalist" and one-eyed philanderer who lies with conviction. Jack hates to be alone, but Mimi's distance forces even him to prefer solitude rather than her company. Isolated, Mimi conjures up various identities for the homeless woman, from her own demented mother to the disfigured victim of a bomb blast, to the miracle worker who loses everything when she can't perform. The early chapters suffer from constantly shifting points of view, making it difficult to follow the narrative. Diski's dreamlike landscape is meant to reveal a many-layered past, yet readers may feel as trapped inside the disturbing vision as a dreamer would be, caught in someone else's dream. The key might be found in the epigraph from Freud: "those dreams best fulfill their function about which one knows nothing after waking." Although Diski's descriptions are deft and her paradoxes provocative, "knowing nothing" is how readers may feel by story's end.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent!,
This review is from: The Dream Mistress (Hardcover)
An excellent story. Simply that. The dream mistress is about sleeping beauty, only in a different touch. Jenny Diksi has created a wonderful new look at what we normaly think, and does so with such skill. One of my very favorite authors, and one of my favorite books. Definately a talent worth knowing/reading.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging, but the ending will infuriate you.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Dream Mistress (Hardcover)
Floating sometimes inscrutably between the life of a young clothing designer damaged by her turbulent childhood and the life of an old homeless woman clinging to anonymity, this book develops the reader's curiosity but never delivers. Each of the storylines revolves around a romantic love relationship, and the reader finds herself entwined in the parallel plots despite their occasional obtuseness. Though the ride is entertaining, the climax never materializes and the ending leaves the reader disappointed and bitter.
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