Books like Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a monstrously ambitious and exuberantly experimental novel, it is so extravagantly intricate that it literally turns into a cultural and lexical conundrum.Considering James Joyce’s greatest influence on the book, it may easily be titled as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Madman.Every madman needs one’s own mad cosmology…The night firmament is abstract density of music, symphony without end, illumination without end, yet emptier, more sparsely lit, than the most succinct constellations of genius. Now seen merely, a depthless lining of hemisphere, its crazy stippling of stars, it is the passional movements of the mind charted in light and darkness. The tense passional intelligence, when arithmetic abates, tunnels, skymole, surely and blindly (if we only thought so!) through the interstellar coalsacks of its firmament in genesis, it twists through the stars of its creation in a network of loci that shall never be co-ordinate. The inviolable criterion of poetry and music, the non-principle of their punctuation, is figured in the demented perforation of the night colander. The ecstatic mind, the mind achieving creation, take ours for example, rises to the shaftheads of its statement, its recondite relations of emergal, from a labour and a weariness of deep castings that brook no schema.Having real prototypes for its personages (Smeraldina-Rima is Peggy Sinclair, Syra-Cusa – Lucia Joyce, Alba – Ethna MacCarthy) the story also may be read as a roman à clef.And, of course, every madman has one’s own mad loves: abstract love, spiritual love, ideal love, platonic love, carnal love, failed love…Still, bitched and all as the whole thing was from that sacrificial morning on, they kept it going in a kind of way, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in a gehenna of sweats and fiascos and tears and an absence of all douceness.So roving the world purposelessly, young Belacqua – an author’s alter ego – finds himself caught in the rattrap of his indolence and he sees himself as a denizen of Limbo and an eternal prisoner in Dante’s Hell…At his simplest he was trine. Just think of that. A trine man! Centripetal, centrifugal and… not. Phoebus chasing Daphne, Narcissus flying from Echo and… neither. Is that neat or is it not? The chase to Vienna, the flight to Paris, the slouch to Fulda, the relapse into Dublin and… immunity like hell from journeys and cities.Travelling through life, similar to Narcissus, one looks for one’s reflection in all things.