Customer Reviews

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (2 Volume Set)

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A long, dreamy, slow swim in the poetic twilight of our collective psyche... come and drown in this massive two-volume novel, this landscape of nightmare imagery, opium dreams, and sentences that may last through an entire page, but remember to breathe for with every breath a new level of conciousness is reached within the reader as we are compelled to dive into the terrifying, mythic and shadowy inner lives of the extraordinary phantom-like characters who populate the ever-present netherworld of "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling", a lyrical oddysey of the soul that leaves us forever and unexpectedly enchanted and changed. From the foreword by Anais Nin:

"The key to the enjoyment of this amazing book is to abandon one's self to the detours, wanderings, elliptical and tangential journeys, accepting in return miraculous surprises. This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: 'Life is a dream.'"--Anais Nin

Originally published in 1965, this great work, equally comprised of spirit, emotion AND intellect, was 20 years in the making and still to this day has not received the acclaim and recognition it so thoroughly deserves. Though Marguerite Young died in 1996 at the age of 87, she lives brightly in the lives of all who are touched by this haunting, under-appreciated masterpiece.

Just want to let buyers know that ISBN 015660793x, Harvest/HBJ, is Volume Two of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the culmination of the work.

Anais Nin

"This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: 'Life is a dream.'"

Kurt Vonnegut

"Marguerite Young is unquestionably a genius."

William Goyen, New York Times Book Review, 9/12/65

"A work of stunning magnitude and beauty. . . . The book's mysterious readability is effected through enchantment and hypnosis. Its force is cumulative; its method is amassment, as in the great styles of Joyce or Hermann Broch or Melville or Faulkner. . . . One of the most arresting literary achievements in our last 20 years. . . . It is a masterwork."

Lillian Smith, Chicago Tribune

"An extraordinary book by a woman possessed of a breathtaking verbal virtuosity. She also has quality of heart. . . . There are times when her pages surge and beat on the heart and imagination like great music; other times when it shimmers motionless like an ancient Hindu painting."

Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 3/21/93

"The prose is lyric, striking and memorable."

L.A. Reader, 2/93

This encyclopedic novel addresses the question of illusion, as Young--whose epic vision and exquisite prose are truly awesome--dissects the essence of reality and ruminates on where it can be found."

Belles Lettres, Winter 1993

"[A]n ambitious work of gorgeous fiction, written in waves of lush, imagistic, even humorous language. . . . This is a work of genius."

About the Author

A descendent of Brigham Young, Marguerite Young was born in Indiana in 1909 and moved to New York City in the 1940s. A respected literary figure and Greenwich Village eccentric, Young associated with writers from Richard Wright to Dylan Thomas to Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein. Besides her legendary and lengthy novel Miss Macintosh, My Darling (originally published in 1965), Young published two works of poetry, Prismatic Ground (1937) and Moderate Fable (1944); a work of nonfiction, Angel in the Forest (1945); and a collection of stories, essays and reviews, Inviting the Muses (1944), before her death in 1995. Her monumental biography of Eugene Debs, on which she worked for 30years, was published posthumously.

This will be very short. As any devotee of Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist knows, MMMD finds its way into the main character's reading habits (and is even glimpsed, in faithful obeisance to the novel, as traveller William Hurt's reading matter in the movie adaptation of Anne Tyler's novel.) I personally plan to have it at my side on my journey through eternity when I am laid to rest in my casket. (I have been reading and re-reading it for the past 17 years.)

"Farewell to the dream of the past, for it should be laid bare like a corpse before my eyes, and I should see that there is nothing which does not bear the capacity to surprise and shock us with the absence of all those qualities and properties we had supposed - perhaps, too, with the presences of others."(MMMD)

Or as The Accidental Tourist might muse:

"My mother had always wanted to die while travelling - as then she would never completely die - for every traveller dies merely by passing through a city, and none will know that landscape which he passes through in the long night. Death is that which is caused by our partial knowledge."(MMMD)

The admirers of this book form a cult, as I think even they would admit. Like any other cult, they hold certain beliefs that make perfect sense to them, yet strike the uninitiated as, shall we say, nuts.

The author, Marguerite Young, was the subject of an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction a good number of years ago. A respectful interviewer asked her why the character of Miss Macintosh was missing her hair, a limb, and several other useful things. Ms. Young replied, "Because everything is lost."

If this strikes you as a pearl of Zarathustrian wisdom, I suppose these 1,200 pages of "oceanic" prose, ebbing and flowing away with a charmingly feminine disregard for such stodgy concerns as structure and narrative momentum, just might be your meat. If it seems instead the self-caressing delusion of a profoundly second-rate word-spiller, you might want to pass by the brightly-clad strangers shaking their tambourines in your face and make your way to a church with a more substantial following.

I started to read this 1200-page book on the recommendation of my psychoanalyst. I was lost by the middle of page 2, and gave up entirely at page 17. It's a wonder I made it that far. Reading this book was like swimming upside down in a vat of peanut oil. Everything seems like it's inverted and moving in slow motion. Most of the time I wasn't even sure who was talking. I really want to meet the person who has read this book all the way to the end. He/she probably also competes in "iron man" triathalons and peruses the tax code for pleasure. Not my cup of tea!

I had a tough time plowing through this book. In fact, I didn't. It was impenetrable. There was almost no dialog and nothing much seemed to happen. Since I couldn't make any headway at the beginning, I tried starting at various places throughout the book. I couldn't get anywhere. My eyes glazed over. I suppose that means it is a great work beyond my comprehension.