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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worthy kernels of writing in a dream-like narrative,
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This review is from: The Dream Sequence: A Novella (Paperback)
The protagonist of Kate Hunter's novella The Dream Sequence wakes up without her memory in a reality readers won't find familiar, a world in which seeking medical attention for one's amnesia apparently isn't the done thing. Instead, Hunter's character attempts to piece together her past through her dreams and through consultation with a witch doctor. The diagnosis: she's lost her memory because she's been cursed--a fate which seems to be fairly common in Hunter's world.
Hunter's amnesiac tells her story in the first person, describing a reality that is not quite in focus and a series of dreams that are mostly incomprehensible. Other stories are nested within hers, primarily the witch doctor's account of a former patient's reported experiences. The book's prologue removes readers one step further from the events described in the book. Hunter thus explores the nature and limitations of memory while playing with the narrative form, her protagonist forced to navigate a world that doesn't quite make sense. The effect is something like Memento meets Alice in Wonderland. There are things I liked about the book. Hunter has a talent for description: "I got up from the bed and walked over to the window and pulled it upwards and all of a sudden it wasn't quiet anymore--the sounds of the night had collected outside the window, pressing against the glass, and opening it made them fall inwards, into the room in a rush; the sirens and the rumble of traffic were taking shape and dispersing while pieces of conversation floated through the air into the room like falling leaves." And she has interesting things to say about the nature of memory. Toward the book's end her protagonist dreams of a man Borges might have concocted, whose memory runs in the wrong direction: he "remembers" the future, but once his memories are lived they are lost to him. Hunter's book contains a number of such worthy kernels, but I found the story as a whole too disjointed and hard to follow to be enjoyable. But then I don't like Alice in Wonderland much either. I'm sure Hunter will find more cerebral readers who will appreciate what she's doing in her novel better than I can. Debra Hamel
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cool, pensive, and smart,
By
This review is from: The Dream Sequence: A Novella (Paperback)
I liked this one a lot. It was very odd, dreamy, kind of trippy -- one of those books that leaves you a bit tranced out when you finish, and not quite sure where you are for a minute. The Dream Sequence is a neat, short package of a tale, with good musings on the nature of time and memory and also -- almost tangentially but in fact most importantly -- it's a fable about living in the city. That sensation of being one among many, the slippage of identity, the ways good and bad will are exchanged in a moment -- it's a perfect allegory for all the small tensions and wonders that come along with urban life.
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