The Mirror in the Well [Paperback]

Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2008

A woman's sexual awakening is a tragedy when the woman is married to someone other than the man who awakens her. But until then, her marriage, now doomed, was a sleepwalker's tragedy. This novel will shock and offend some readers. Unapologetically explicit in its language, extreme in some of the acts it catalogues, it makes no pretense of submission to middle-class decency, let alone to expectations of happy endings. All three people in this love triangle are flawed, damaged, human. Things fall apart, and the resolution is unclear. Why does she do it? Why should we read it? The answer is one word: Ecstasy. Micheline Aharonian Marcom has a genius for language that is not only beautiful in and of itself, but also engages the heart. Lusher than Marguerite Duras, more tender and erotic than Cormac McCarthy, but nearly as dark, this is a narrative masterpiece.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Marcom's three previous (and provocative) novels earned her much critical acclaim, but none shocks the reader like her intensely raw latest endeavor. This short novel is the story of a nameless woman and her lover and husband, who are intricately involved in the oscillating pleasure and angst of passion. The text is filled with unflinchingly rendered sex scenes, stream of consciousness, mythology, dreams and dreamlike realities, all blurred into each other, resulting in a narrative that portrays with disturbing accuracy the intimate behaviors and thoughts of lovers. Its explicit language, an invigorating mix of debauchery and poetic complexity, is disturbing at times, as in episodes of sexual violence or of uncommon acts (urine-drinking, for instance). Through this vivid imagery, Marcom gives voice to the essence of obsession and sexuality while tracing the deterioration of relationships. This novel is a cultural, feminist and human statement, but at its core, it is an unrestrained exploration of the intersection of emotion and physical desires. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Marcom has been lauded for the intensity and beauty of her novels about the Armenian genocide and, in Draining the Sea (2008), the Guatemalan civil war, earning a Lannan fellowship and a Whiting Award. She now explores the mysteries of sexual obsession, practicing the risky art of explicitness with exceptional lyricism and audacious perception. An unfulfilled, married California businesswoman and the mother of two young sons becomes involved with a married artist and discovers carnal bliss. The entire world is eroticized as this anxious and reckless disciple of sex and misery senses the presence of the gods in orgasmic rapture. Unmoored from propriety, she is “violently alive,” desperately lonely, and utterly shattered. Writing with rare candor about female sexuality and cosmic verve about eroticism as a portal to the realm of myth and archetypes, Marcom enters the circle of Anaïs Nin, Annie Ernaux, and Kate Braverman, a flame-fingered poet of the tyranny and divinity of the body, the treachery and radiance of the mind, and the terrors and revelations of ecstasy. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; First edition (September 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564785114
• ISBN-13: 978-1564785114
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #949,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Raw, nasty, disturbing -- an exact accounting of the cost of ecstasy, November 10, 2008

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mirror in the Well (Paperback)

In 2004, her first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation for first fiction. This was the only prize that Micheline Aharonian Marcom missed that year --- "Three Apples Fell from Heaven" was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and won her a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a signal that she was an extremely promising writer.

In 2005, Micheline Aharonian Marcom won a PEN/USA Award for her second novel, "The Daydreaming Boy".

And now here she is with "The Mirror in the Well" --- the most sexually explicit novel I have ever read.

Will awards follow? Only if the judges are fearless.

Oh, I have read more sex in books that are clearly and proudly pornography. But in what's known as "literary" fiction? No way. Ever.

Because readers of all ages can access this site, I will not quote the book's language. As for the descriptions of sex --- let's just say no serious female writer I've read has ever dared to go this raw, this dirty.

So this is, right on the surface, a disturbing book.

It's also addictive, like a dream that returns nightly or a wine that tastes so good you can't stop --- or, as in these pages, an affair that reduces your life to what happens in bed with him/her.

If you understand what I'm talking about here --- if extreme experience is part of your secret history --- this book may seem as if Marcom has somehow gained access to your memory bank.

If you don't understand --- if you have orderly relationships and dreams that hurt no one --- this 137-page novel will blow your mind in a different way.

No matter who you are, this is strong adult fare. Consider yourself warned.

The story is simple. An unnamed woman --- near 40, with a husband and two young sons --- meets a never-to-be-named man. He too is married, also unhappily. Something draws them together; they arrange an encounter.

In the cheap motel, he holds her, nearly naked, against a mottled mirror. She is beautiful in this light, but she doesn't recognize herself: "something out of a circle of ideas, a blurred picture of eros, and you behind her..."

One sentence later, and we know how it is 18 months later: Her husband has learned about the affair and moved out. But right now Marcom returns us to that first encounter. The woman doesn't want to do it, and the man is fine with that --- he just wants to service her.

She's been making love since she was 18. But as the minutes go by, each one dedicated solely to her pleasure, "she is aroused beyond the point of return.' The man and woman will, in time, explore "whips and small pains in bed", but this --- this is the way they seal their bond, each and every time, with him pleasuring her "so that the circuit is completed."

This sex is rapture, and that opens her up. "Pleasure is the reason to live." Pleasure destroys time. Pleasure tells her "for what she was born."

And pleasure unhinges her, because she wants to live there all the time and that's not possible. She craves a divorce; she wants her husband back. She wants her lover; she wants the blond man at the office, she wants --- she doesn't know what she wants.

The woman is shattered, her dreams twist like kites. On the other hand, she felt something deep and wild in herself --- she felt herself as a goddess.

Was it worth the pain?

If you're not too freaked out by the last sex scene to think, it's yours to decide.

0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Like a dark abstract painting, November 15, 2008

By 

Vivek (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mirror in the Well (Paperback)

Award winning? Five star material? Perhaps for forty plus, sexually disturbed women! Otherwise very strange! I couldn't get past first few pages.