Madeleine Is Sleeping (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "HUSH, MOTHER SAYS..." (more)
Key Phrases: Sister Clavel, Saint Michel

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An immensely obese woman who sprouts two magnificent pairs of wings, a lonely housewife who grows strings to match her husband's viol and a lascivious, wealthy widow are just a few of the fantastical characters who populate the enchanting world of Bynum's debut. Written in brief, dreamy segments (appropriately enough, since the title character has fallen into a Sleeping Beauty–like slumber), the book alternates deftly between reality and illusion as it follows Madeleine down a path of sexual, artistic and personal discovery. In a perverse revisitation of Ludwig Bemelmans's classic children's books, Madeleine, exiled to a Parisian convent from her pastoral French home after committing a rather scientific sex act with the village idiot, joins a band of gypsies who wind up performing for a widow with a love of photography and a penchant for the pornographic. As Madeleine grows entwined in an intensely erotic love triangle with the "flatulent man," M. Pujol, and Adrien, the photographer assigned to document the widow's grotesquely arranged tableaux, life at home grows worse for the family holding vigil over her as she sleeps. The book culminates in a masterful merge between Madeleine's waking life and her dreams, making it impossible to discern whether reality ever existed in Bynum's imaginative tale. Replete with Kafkaesque metamorphoses, Freudian fantasies, Aesopian justice and religious metaphor, the novel is equal parts fairy tale, fable, romance and bildungsroman. At times, the allegorical allusions grow predictable, and some readers may be put off by the constant shifts and uncertainty between fact and fiction. Others looking for a challenging, unusual read will be thrilled by the imagination and mysterious energy that haunt this remarkable debut.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

The realist tradition in prose fiction has grown so powerful and wide-ranging over the last couple of centuries that most of the fiction we consider fantasy uses what might be called the physics of realism: Time passes in one direction, persons are born, eat and drink, talk and walk, maintain their identities as they do in "realistic" fiction. The main alternative tradition tends to be based on forcing the reader by various means to focus on the verbal construct that bears the fiction: This thing is a word thing, not a record. Lasting works that dispense with the physics of realism without becoming self-referential verbal constructs are rare, and they tend to resemble dreams, or at least to invite comparison to dreams.

In Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's first novel the comparison is at once obvious and problematic, and one source of the book's attraction: For there is a dreamer in the book, the eponymous Madeleine, and the events told of are at once her dream and not her dream, at once generated by her and about her. In a series of brief chapters or vignettes, Bynum describes Madeleine's prolonged sleeping -- "Madeleine is as still as a mummy, but when they hold the mirror beneath her nose, ghostly shapes appear on its cold surface" -- as well as her adventures on her dream-journeys.

Madeleine's tales occur in a fairylandish belle-epoque France, where her large family flourishes making wonderful preserves from the fruits of their orchard. Her mother believes that Madeleine's sleeping somehow protects the family's health and fortune; when Madeleine ventures out, or dreams she does, those fortunes indeed turn bad. Her first and determining fall (in a chapter headed "she dreams") is to visit the "half-wit" M. Jouy and, as the other village girls have done before her, masturbate him for a penny. Unlike the other girls, though she doesn't know why, she is caught and horribly punished: Her hands are thrust into a pot of boiling lye, which bakes them into mitten-like paddles. Since her sisters and her mother contemplate these paddles as Madeleine lies sleeping, the sin and the punishment occur both in dream and in "actuality," unless Madeleine's family's actions are part of her dream too, or both are and aren't.

Madeleine thereupon lies sleeping and is simultaneously sent to Paris to be one of 12 little girls in two straight lines who live in a house covered in vines. She escapes to live with a troupe of gypsy showmen, and the story begins to draw on the dreamlike connections between appearance and reality that come with the milieu of freaks, audiences and display. The troupe includes solemn and timid M. Pujol, with whom Madeleine falls in love and who, billed as Le Petomane, has the uncanny ability to imitate a thousand sounds by passing wind; and Charlotte, whose hair has grown over her breast and can be played like a viol. Now out of fashion with audiences, the troupe becomes the private plaything of a rich old lady who likes to earwitness Madeleine paddling M. Pujol's backside while Charlotte plays and Adrien the photographer takes pictures for her to see.

This does not exhaust Bynum's strange cast. It's a tribute to her talent that the lurid and excessive, nearly Gothic tale-telling seems neither crowded nor outrageous but instead delicate, grave and almost evanescent. That the story actually is a story, and a strangely well-carpentered one, only gradually dawns on the reader -- though it's a story whose dream-logic alone is completed.

The many plot-strands ("plot" in this book meaning something music-like, involving repetition, inversion, variation and development rather than a consequent stream of events) come together as the book narrows toward a conclusion. Madeleine's mother and sisters rescue M. Jouy the "half-wit" from the insane asylum to which he was remanded; Mother has a plan to marry her sleeping Madeleine to M. Jouy and reverse the curse on the family. Meanwhile Madeleine plans to spring M. Pujol, the flatulent, who has committed himself to the same asylum (do you begin to see how the really very clever strategies of the book work?). She intends to bring him to her home village, where he will be able once again to perform, in an improvised theater she will make, with the help of her sisters, in the barn where first she pleasured M. Jouy, if she did. Disappointment, failure, but also completion and finally Madeleine . . . falls asleep.

Does Bynum's book have precedents among the dream-books? I was reminded a little of Georges Bataille's The Eye, without the hysterical pornographic edge. The cool, shifting perspectives, where scenes enlarge and vanish in a paragraph, suggest Bruno Schulz. Lewis Carroll occurred to somebody, for a photograph of his adorns the cover with weird aptness, though his hard-edged exactness of dream is not Bynum's. The masterful way she has kept her disappearing balls in the air -- mostly by means of a voice at once sensuous and humorous, mellifluous and matter-of-fact -- reminds of no one, unless it's that wonderful dream-narrator we all possess, who tells us the most outlandish and dirty stories quite calmly, and doesn't mind doubling us and others, or making things happen twice at the same time.

Reviewed by John Crowley
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 276 pages
• Publisher: Harvest Books (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156032279
• ISBN-13: 978-0156032278
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #231,958 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Angela Carter meets Choose Your Own Adventure, October 4, 2004

By	Maggie Smith (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Madeleine Is Sleeping (Hardcover)

This book is irresistable. The prose poem-like chapters thread through a carnival of characters and settings, leading you from one strange and beautiful world to another. The language is stunning; the story is part fairy tale, part historical fiction, part surreal tableau.

As a book seller, I see hundreds of new novels every year, many of which are well-written, innovative, and lovely, but this is one of those rare gems--a story so perfect in its peculiarity, so delightful in its turns--that you feel you have been given a gift of something you didn't even know you wanted until it was there in your hands.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "What terrible things we do in our effort to be admired.", October 27, 2005

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Madeleine Is Sleeping (Hardcover)

In this strange and often beautiful novel in which reality and fantasy overlap, Madeleine, a young girl, reclines romantically in what appears to be a permanent state of sleep, with her family and neighbors all tiptoeing around her. Her mind, however, is active, creating a bizarre dream world in which she lives out a series of adolescent fantasies, exploring who she is, what kind of adult will she become, what her role in life may be, what makes her unique, and how her sexual fantasies might be fulfilled.

Unique characters appear in her dreams--an immensely fat woman (Mathilde, Madame Cochon) who has two pairs of wings, a girl who has a stringed body which she can play like a viol, a man who creates the sounds of the nightingale and the cuckoo with his flatulence, a "half-wit" who exposes himself to children, an opera singer dethroned by a castrato, and a photographer in a mental institution, along with Madeleine's real-life family. The "action," real and imagined, ranges from a gypsy circus, where Madeleine studies tumbling, to the home of a widow, where the strangely gifted circus performers act out tableaux vivants, and eventually to a mental hospital, before returning to Madeleine's family and home in rural France.

As in our own dreams, strange connections occur among the characters. Madeleine, at one point, becomes the Madeleine from the children's stories about a Parisian convent school, her real-life brothers and sisters appear in the mental hospital dream sequence, and she engages in a love triangle, which becomes a literary joke when the author tries to figure out how to conclude the love story of three characters. Irony takes on new meaning in a book that is itself so out-of-the-ordinary, and the humor is both broad and dark as Madeleine's dreams constantly juxtapose unlikely elements.

The "action," while intriguing on a psychological, dream-like level, sometimes leaves the reader feeling starved for connections to reality, however, and the novel is often self-conscious. Though most readers will see some parallels between action within the dreams and the fantasies of typical adolescents, many will also find it difficult to identify with the cartoonish characters on a personal level or to care much about what happens to them. Art and creativity are strong themes in what passes for the plot, and the conclusion re-emphasizes this theme. Fascinating and often beautifully poetic, the novel ultimately feels like a literary exercise, containing some universal elements of reality, but distanced from the reader. Mary Whipple

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good dream , September 4, 2004

By	Skye (Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Madeleine Is Sleeping (Hardcover)

This book slips off its clothes at a very seductive, rhythmic pace. I was engaged in its turns of phrase and of plot. Very like a dream, and in an innocent, artful way that actually pulls you in deeper and deeper. I read it too fast, though--- it is a page turner as well. I highly recommend this book.