فواره‌های نپتون

Tetralogy of Elements #3

by Rikki Ducornet, عاطفه احمدی (-Transalator)

فواره‌های نپتون سوار بر عنصر آب است، داستانی شاعرانه، غرق در اسطوره و رویا. روایتگر زندگی و زمانه‌ی نیکولا، پسربچه‌ای‌ که در پی حادثه‌ای درون آب می‌افتد و به کمایی پنجاه‌ساله می‌رود و تمام طول دو جنگ جهانی را هم در خواب سپری می‌کند.

رمان در دو بخش روایت می‌شود، یکی روزهای کودکی نیکولا در میان ملوانان و حکایت‌های دریایی وهم‌انگیز، و دیگری بعد از بیداری و تلاش برای واکاوی حافظه و بازسازی تاریخ به‌واسطه‌ی اسطوره و خیال و جهان‌سازی‌های داستان‌سرایانه.

فواره‌های نپتون یکی از رمان‌های مجموعه‌ی چهارگانه‌ی عناصر است که دوکورنه با الهام از اندیشه‌های گاستون باشلار و کاوشگری‌های او در ذهن خیال‌پرداز انسان نوشته است.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Fantasy, Literature, American, Literary Fiction, France

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Rikki Ducornet (born Erika DeGre, April 19, 1943 in Canton, New York) is an American postmodernist, writer, poet, and artist.

Ducornet's father was a professor of sociology, and her mother hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet grew up on the campus of Bard College in New York, earning a B.A. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1964. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe. In 1989 she moved back to North America after accepting a teaching position in the English Department at The University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the The University of Louisiana. In 2008, The American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred upon her one of the eight annual Academy Awards presented to writers.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neptune is the god of the sea… So the water in his fountains is as salty as tears…
The hero of the novel lies in coma… His life is but a dream… His moniker is the Sandman… The Sandman is a fairytale character who brings sleep to children…

As I attempt to weed K’s overgrown garden paths, so do I put order to my memories, disentangling reality from dreams, and Heaven from Hell. These days I do nothing but attempt to interpret those enigmatic wheels, those churning shadows, those cries beyond cries; the story beneath all stories: my own.

The memories are pure poetry… The hero’s childhood is dreamlike… A sea creature’s dream…

The landscape of my boyhood is haunted by ghosts armed with tridents, decked with cockles, tooting twisted conches. When it rains, as it often does, I can hear dogfish barking in the thunder, and in lightning clearly see the claws of catfish striking at the body of Heaven. Evenings the alleys are surging with pelicans and tiger-faced sharks.

A seaside tavern… It’s full of seafaring tales… The secret life of the town… Murky family secrets… A mental trauma sends the boy into coma… The Great War begins…

“How gladly civilians and soldiers alike traded serenity for vertigo! Someone cried: ‘We’ll celebrate victory at Christmas!’ Everyone imagined something fleet and coloured and noble. But Christmas came and went and the New Year, too. War was no longer the heady tumult of confronting armies out upon the open field; it was maddening stagnation in mud mazes and tunnels of smoke.”

Clocks keep ticking… Years are passing… The sleeper keeps sleeping…

The night Sputnik passed overhead, I opened my eyes for the first time in thirty years, and before closing them again for another twenty, I sang a song…

When we stop the world and time keep moving forth leaving us behind.

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

First a note for pop music lovers: the female author of this book, Rikki Ducornet, is the Rikki of the Steely Dan song “Rikki Don't Lose That Number.” Details from Wikipedia at the end of this review.

This book is very much a psychological novel focused on the quirks of memory and filled with brilliant literary writing, imagination, storytelling, myth and fantasy. It’s dream-like.



The story starts with an eight-year-old boy growing up in seaport town in France. Even though he is that age, the man who acts as his father takes him to seedy waterfront cafes. He grows up hearing fantastic tales from fascinating drunken characters who tell him seafaring adventures about mermaids, monsters and ogres. He has vague memories of his real mother and real father who drowned when he was about three years old.

It’s horse-and-buggy days. Still eight years old, he almost drowns in a swimming accident. After this incident his memories flood back to him of the violent way his parents died – they were murdered – and he lapses into a coma that lasts 50 years. (I’m not giving away plot, this is in the blurbs on the book cover.)

"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind."

While in a coma, he is under the care of a woman psychoanalyst, a protégée of Freud. She lives in a dilapidated rambling mansion that acts as a hospital and health spa. By chance, he survived a Nazi squad who came in and killed all the other patients.

When he awakens, the psychoanalyst, now 80 years old, having cared for him for 50 years, loves him as her son. Of course he still has the mind of an eight-year old and is initially so physically weak that he is in a wheelchair. In the rambling rooms he builds a fantasy world out of paper mâché, telling the psychoanalyst that he is getting back into “reality.” “Is this God’s dilemma, I wonder, to have created a world he cannot participate in because it is too small for his aspirations?”



She tries to make him face his horrible memories and writes a best-selling book about him. He’s known as “The Sandman.” For part of the story, while she is lecturing in the USA, they share their thoughts in letters, so we get to see the inner workings of his mind.

A brief example of the lyrical style of writing:

“This was my stage and these my props: an obelisk lost among the trees; a staircase carved of shadow; the worn marble of abandoned floors soaking up a landscape reflected in windows desperately in need of washing. An empty cabinet smelling faintly of cordials. An attic as vast as a cathedral. The hot cubbyholes of chambermaids. Balconies green with wind-sewn weeds, their rotting balustrades. Overgrown topiaries battling above the quiet pool where I saw my own reflection as beaked as any heron’s.”

The author (b. 1943) has written a half-dozen novels and is probably best known for the one titled Netsuke. She was born in the US but lived in France for about 20 years and then returned to the US as a professor at various universities.



Here’s the pop music story from Wikipedia I mentioned at the start of the review. Rikki Ducornet is the Rikki of the Steely Dan song "Rikki Don't Lose That Number." Steely Dan singer Donald Fagen had met her while both were attending Bard College. Ducornet says they met at a college party, and even though she was both pregnant and married at the time, he gave her his number. Ducornet was intrigued by Fagen and was tempted to call him, but she decided against it.

Top photo of a Paris cafe in 1900 from alamy.com
Watercolor of La Rochelle by Paul Signac from 1stdibs.com
The author from shelf-awareness.com

[PirateSteve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fountains Of Neptune experience for me is a brackish filled fountain in and of itself.
Generously constructed by Ms.Ducornet as she draws upon the fresh and salt water expression.
Channeling a fresh water river of refined language used to convey contemplations and dreams.
Then brazenly she summons a salt water tide. The raffish dialogue of those that solicit the sea.

Submerge yerself within this fountain, I say.
Abandon yer rags and liberate yer thoughts, seek the waters fer a true reflection...

How much of it will you remember?
Will you too dream of the rapturous sea,
Toujours-La and Odille.

[Lynne King · Rating 3 out of 5]

The jury is still out.

“The night Sputnik passed overhead, I opened my eyes for the first time in thirty years and before closing them again for another twenty, I sang a song. Rose’s churning song, from start to finish. K managed to catch the refrain:

When the Devil comes
Take up a stick
And beat, beat, beat him about the horns.
Beat the Devil ‘til he calls for his mother;
Beat the Devil into white cream
And sweet, sweet butter.”

Having read two excellent books by Rikki Ducornet, and thoroughly enjoying her writing style, I was ready for my third “fix” and I started it with enthusiasm. The basis for the book was enough to ensure that it had to be good. It’s about a man called Nicolas who after being traumatized by his mother’s death falls into a coma and the “blurb” could not have put it better:

“My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between them. It was as if I had been turned up by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar that gripped my mind”.

The book is interspersed with dreams, thoughts from living in a coma; water, both real and metaphorical, is in evidence everywhere; there are many references to the devil; the elements of the sea, ships, sailors, deck boys, fish, colours, the heavens... And food, of course. How can you possibly not mention food in France? But then this is tossed in with the Devil’s food.

I was confused, however, in that I didn’t understand certain sections of this book quite frankly. Dreams can be odd. I know because I’ve had many strange ones myself but when I’m not too sure about what the author is talking about, I tend to skim read and to my shame, I did this from time to time. I could have abandoned this book quite easily but firstly, I have faith in RD’s writing ability and so I continued…And secondly, she is after all my second favourite author of all time, after Lawrence Durrell. One must never abandon a sinking ship without a fight.

The idea of water flows throughout the book, which I thought would naturally be there after reading the book’s title. However, the first part concerned me somewhat as I was in a constant state of apprehension, mixed in with confusion. I couldn’t determine who the “other mother” was. Was that Rose or was it his mother Odille? Surely it had to be Rose? Totor as an individual was described beautifully as was Rose, but there was, je ne sais quoi, something missing for me that I normally get with this author’s works. I do think the problem was that my own thinking process was out-of-sync with RD’s.

To read about Nicolas’ (Nini) childhood was touching, scattered with odd individuals such as Toujours-Là, the Cod’s wife, Bottlenose and the Marquis, and was amusing especially with the backdrop of the “Ghost Port Bar” in a seaport town in France. And as for the monkey, the bat and the baboon…

The second part was more “normal” when Nicolas realizes that he’s no longer a little boy but a man. Nevertheless, the characters are confusing and disjointed (for me anyway but probably not to anyone else) even in their richly written style. After awakening from his coma, Nicolas’ conversations about his dreams with the young and brilliant Viennese, Doctor Kasierstiege (known as K - the world’s only Freudian hydropothist – splendid word!), are odd and superbly written:

“ ‘I am a barnacle,’ I replied, perhaps more wistfully than I intended. ‘I have spent my life stuck to dream’s bottom.’ And I sighed.”

When Doctor Kasierstiege finally leaves him, I became even more confused in this exquisitely written section because she continues to keep in contact with him because after all he is her “Sandman”, her own mythical son:

“According to gnostic tradition, the archons asked Adam:

‘Where have you come from?’ The quest for knowledge is first and foremost the quest for self-knowledge.
When the Sandman fell into his own reflection, he was attempting to answer the archons’ question. As we have seen, for the Sandman, it is water that holds the answer. Each reflection is a triumvirate: Vouivre, Father, Self. The metaphor could not be better: The Virtuous Abyss is no other than the female aspect of Neptune. She who ‘animates the mud’ is mother of us all. “

Then finally I arrived at the part I had been eagerly awaiting when Nicolas remembers Odille, his father and Thomas:

“As the story goes, within the hour all three – wife, cuckold, assassin – were dead.” He remembers everything in detail, and there’s water, water and more water.

As if in a long convoluted dream, I arrived at the last two chapters; well they were exquisite in their content. I finally understood the significance of the fountains. My…I guess that I’m slow on the uptake.

When I finished this book, all I could do was equate it to falling off a horse, and knowing that I had to remount that horse again as soon as possible or else I would never ride again. I’m thoroughly at odds with this book as it brought out such contradictory emotions and thoughts in me. To me Rikki Ducornet is a remarkable author and I’m looking forward to reading her other books. Her imagination is remarkable and she has a way with words that entrances me but nevertheless I wasn’t too enamoured with this book. It’s brilliantly written but it didn’t “move” me. It somehow lacked something in my mind. However, I’ll put this book behind me and move on to another of RD’s books. Authors cannot be perfect all the time though can they? And perhaps I will appreciate this book at a later time as tastes do change.

And as I stated earlier, the jury is still out.

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

With certain reviews floating around Goodreads and the jacket cover description, I was reluctant to slip between the covers of this book – it is not one of the most entrancing subjects, the idea of someone sleeping more than half a life-time through both world wars and awakening to discover loss in all its myriad forms. And this description, since it is the seeming device with which the story is rendered, is the first step along the voyage to misunderstanding the nature of this book. It’s an easy hook to catch a reader, but it is as misleading a reduction of what the book concerns as asserting that Moby Dick is about a big whale. Whether the other books, The Stain, Entering Fire and The Jade Cabinet comprising the Tetralogy, a composition of the elements Earth, Fire, Water and Air, have been read in no way affects the enjoyment of The Fountains of Neptune since it is perhaps Ducornet’s most brilliant and least understood work.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I entered dreaming this dream of the author's dreaming about others dreaming the dreams of others. She may well have written this while dreaming or upon waking, or the tremble of the dream that visits during the tending of the world. It is written in the words of dream-breath. We have no say, dreams arrive and end as they may. The one's most important might thrive unnoticed, their remaining shreds vanishing into the ether of the worlds scrum. Our hope is to awake into the dream calling for us now; to have that fortune.

A little boy on a beach of sand witnesses the killing of his mother, her body then thrown into to sea. He is rescued by Rose and Totor. Roses's dedication to the objects of existence, their consistencies and promises of security nurture the young boy and his quick-hardened retreat from what he has seen. Totor leads him into the lore of aging sailors and the sea.

"What is the sea for the man who has left her? She is fire-water, whiskey, rum, a roric flame. She is a green-eyed witch; she speaks in tongues. Her coral rings are forged of skeletons; her white shoulders glisten with the dust of powdered bones.
"She is the memory, the number of numbers, the eye of the world, the mirror of the sea. What is the ocean for the sailor who has loved and left her? The one lover who dissolves the night. A bottomless glass of moonshine.
And sailors? All sea-talkers. The son of mermen."

"Totor was more than a man; he was the perpetual glamour of the sea made flesh. Master of foam, of fish, of dancing ships with humor and sadness (this aged shell-back, landlocked, in retirement, missed the sea), he told of opal mists and listing ships, the stuff of tears and wonder which took root in the flood lands of my curiosity and made me as sensitive to the marvelous as a jellyfish to the sunlight."

At the Ghost, a port bar, little Nicholas or Nini is introduced into the ill lighted world of seamen who also have also lost their lives, the sea, to age and infirmities. The lights of reverie, lore, yarn, the iconic store of threads embellished with each telling and retelling, are their lives. liquor staves off the leaden brackets of longing. Attracted to, tutored and taught, Nini, willingly enters the world of imagination, reverie, dreams. A world he finds as complicit, satisfying, and secure as any offered. He is a young child and is to learn fast.

When taken out on a boat there is a rapid slippage of the confluence of imagination and reality. Nini sees his mother's face in the water and he jumps over the side into the waiting image. Saved from drowning he does not wake. He is in a coma and tells the story to himself and we who are listening, of the next fifty years of his life asleep. In the world of the woman rogue psychologist who treats him in her palatial home, he has not woken, however inside he lives his inner life.

She insists,

"...that the self is rooted in nostalgia and reverie, and that they are the fountains of Art." She argues that, "Art reveals the real. That the existential is always subjective. All that is true is hidden deep in the body of the world and cannot be taken by force. It must be dreamed, and attended, and received with awe and affection. But be careful. You are walking a tightrope. Madness is often the handmaiden of genius. To survive the world we must all be lucid dreamers!"

Lucid dreamers. Dreaming of lucidity. He awakes after fifty years and two world wars. She helps him through the trauma of existing in this calendared world. He is now supposedly, awake. I, as reader, know nothing, nothing for sure other than un-suredness. Sufficiently recovered, he sees her leave for the U.S. to talk about (promote?) her book about him. Invited he declines having no need for this world. He will exist outside what are now the crumbling palatial walls in print, bound.

In her absence he builds in these faltering rooms, using scraps of materials, a world of his inner existence. He fills the rooms and excludes history, time. His creations are articulate, representative, replacing what had been inside, outside? A group of self righteous town-women ransack the rooms or his inner compartments (?), finding what fills them incendiary and dangerous to their secured beliefs. Time is not to be stopped but measured, the world needs to pass upon the safety of its agreed upon notions.

I leave dreaming this review, which was dreamt about within a book of dreaming of those willed or choosing to dream in a world of reverie, which all memories are fated to become. What to choose if one has a choice, reverie and dreaming or being awake? Is there an awake or simply memories, which arrive as soon as what is present is no more-the quickest fraction of a second- then altered? Once entering Ducornet's silences, the vanishing of words, there is no turning back. Her dream created has been sealed with honeyed mortar, drifted knots of mist, impermeable. It does not end. Continuing to exist it extends an invitation to any Reader. There is no missing it.

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can hear the waves sucking at the land's edge; I can hear the parables, the fables of water, the elusive but lyrical weatherglass vocabularies of water.

The third in Rikki Ducornet's elemental tetralogy, The Fountains of Neptune picks up some threads from the first two books, drops others, and spins some new ones to create a dreamy but sluggish narrative about a boy who spends half a century lost in a coma, falling unconscious in 1910s France and waking up, two world wars later, with his childhood completely lost to him.

‘Water, both real and metaphorical,’ as Ducornet nudges us, ‘is in evidence everywhere.’ It is an accident in the water that sends our narrator Nicolas into his fifty-year sleep; the sea also had something to do with the mysterious loss of his parents; and most of all, the ocean, transparent but also deep and unknowable, functions as a symbol of the unconscious that Nicolas is trapped in for so long.

The most successful parts of the book are the early sections describing Nicolas's childhood in a French fishing village on the Atlantic coast – a chaotic, dangerous world of sailors and down-and-outs that might remind you of the first few chapters of Moby-Dick, or alternatively, depending on your frame of reference, of certain tavern scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean. The seafront bars are presided over by a monstrous ship's carpenter and drunkard called Toujours-Là, whose misogyny and dark, destructive Manichaeanism continues an archetype that began with the Exorcist in Ducornet's first book and was developed by de Bergerac in the second.

‘Don't believe the crap you hear!’ he barked. ‘The universe and all its filthy planets were not created by God but by the Devil. Every morning the sun rises with an empty belly and at night she sinks bloated with blood. You've seen how the moon circles the world like a clean bone?’ I nodded. ‘Like a skull licked clean of meat,’ he insisted.

Like many of her previous characters, Toujours-Là sexualises everything, and turns every little circumstantial phenomenon into a matter of strained gender relations. You know, like this:

He groaned and his lips were flecked with foam. ‘I swear: THE FOG STILL SMELLS OF THAT SLUT'S CUNT!’

The book comes disturbingly alive whenever he's around, which unfortunately, and despite his name, is too rarely. Ducornet's exploration of sexual politics and identities – an exploration that to me seemed strikingly fresh and unusual – is indeed rather abandoned in this novel, to be replaced by ideas of the subconscious. The themes are not unrelated, but I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed that she'd dropped what I thought of as her specialist subject.

The thing is that Nicolas, the narrator, is just not a very compelling central character. (His nickname, Nini, suggests the French phrase for ‘neither…nor’.) And his narrative voice also falters at times: he says things like, ‘Thinking of him now, my heart pulses like a full-fed river,’ which, without wanting to speak for my entire gender, doesn't seem like a very guy-ish thing to say, somehow. Consequently his psychiatric problems and their solution never really felt very important, even though Ducornet has some interesting things to say about the way our unconscious minds seem to work.

‘We forget that thought is a process which has evolved over the ages from anterior stages. Just as our finger-bones still resemble those of the lizard, so at depths deeper than dreaming our thoughts may echo the lobster's.’

There is something unintentionally funny about the use of the word ‘lobster’ there which, again, makes me worry that she is not totally sure-footed in the way she puts this story together. On the other hand, every now and then you will still come across a sentence that demands to be enjoyed more than once.

The smell of smoke which still permeates the spa – stronger, even, than the stench of sulphur – is not the odour of war but of skin kindled and rekindled by unconsummated desire.

It is instructive – though a little frustrating – that this book covers such a dramatic period in European history without really touching on any of it except in passing: Nicolas sleeps through it all. A case is being made here (on my reading of the book anyway) for the primacy of the interior world over exterior events, even ones this earth-shattering: there is an argument in here that what we invent – let us go ahead and use the word ‘fiction’ – is just as real as the real world, indeed in some ways is more real.

I insist that the self is rooted in nostalgia and reverie, and that they are the fountains of Art. I argue that Art reveals the real. That the existential is always subjective. All that is true is hidden deep in the body of the world and cannot be taken by force. It must be dreamed and attended and received with awe and affection.

I am not sure how far I would accept this argument (there is a very valid counterargument involving the word ‘self-indulgence’), but I liked seeing it made in this interesting way. Overall I found this book less successful than its predecessors, but there's still a lot of interesting ideas to get to grips with – and other concerns aside, it's always a pleasure to swim for a few days in Ducornet's salty, pelagian prose.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Confound and Bewilder

For all its five star ratings, this marvellous (third) novel in Rikki Ducornet’s tetralogy of elements deserves a more widespread and attentive reading than it has had so far.

In a mere 220 pages, it manages at first to confound, only later to enchant, then to astonish and finally to bewilder.

Boy(friend) in a Coma

The narrator is a 60 year old boy/man (Nicolas, Nini or the Sandman) who has just emerged from a coma that commenced when he was only nine. It turns out that he witnessed the death of his father, his mother, and the killer of his father. In the intervening 51 years, he has lived in a dream state, missing out on such momentous events as the two world wars.

The Death of Eros

A letter from a soldier in the first world war says:

“Above all I weep, because the Marquis is gone, enchantment is gone, and where he stood there is a hole, a great hole at the heart of the world. And all the wishful substance of our love can do nothing.”

Nicolas’ psychoanalyst (Doctor Venus Kaiserstiege AKA “K”) says of Marquis (it’s not clear to what extent the character is based on de Sade):

“He was Eros, come to walk the earth. He quickened me and everything he touched...The wars killed Eros.”

Dream Life

Nicolas is naturally oblivious to this, because he has been dreaming his own world into existence.

K asks him, “Would you dream through all wars, and never wake up? Do you wish to be God again, Nicolas? Simultaneously dreaming and being the world?”

Metaphysical Delirium

In contrast, in order to recover, she advises him to embrace “an active, an inventive life”.

With K’s help, Nicolas recovers by thinking, imagining, dreaming, playing and creating. Which results in his enchantment by and with the world. As he starts to recover, he declares:

"My life is an enchantment, not a fairy-tale."

At times, it seems that Ducornet is advocating a form of anti-rationalism. Nicolas seems to dwell in a world of what she has called “metaphysical delirium”. The imaginary world that he creates is called “the Kingdom of d’Elir”, and Ducornet calls her own father “the Emperor of d’Elir” in the book’s dedication.

Reason seems to play a secondary, if not quite non-existent, role in his recovery. On the other hand, a sign in his reconstruction of his imaginary world declares:

“Order and system are necessary in everything.”

Water Fables

Analysis demonstrates its value in the role of K, a Freudian psychoanalyst. She is unable to map Nicolas’ psyche, but she does prepare an itinerary which allows him to travel through it in a structured and constructive manner.

Nicolas reveals:

“One night I reached the sea. I stood at the edge of a cliff, looking down, wondered at this magical thing, this enchantment which had, I was certain, been kept from me, purposely. I thought a piece of sky had fallen to the ground!”

Later, he learns that his parents were killed at or on a beach near the sea. Water plays a major role in his psychic life and recovery:

“I can hear the waves sucking at the land’s edge; I can hear the parables, the fables of water, the elusive but lyrical weatherglass vocabularies of water.”

Rebuilding Eden

K writes a book on the Sandman Case, in which she concludes:

“To reconstruct his own story, the Sandman began by building Eden - a metaphor of the world-self as it might have been, had it been ruled by love. Trauma violated his infancy’s garden; I should add: his infancy’s right to Paradise. The Kingdom of d’Elir and its garden satisfied a nostalgia for wholeness and the need for new beginnings. Like all myths, it illuminated a greater reality...

"But as beautiful as d’Elir must have been, I imagine it was also a pathetic place because it was, after all, artificial: the universe reduced to sign, the world as book; an isolated object too small, too illusory for its own inventor to enter...

“In the end the creators of d’Elir can only be confronted by the unattainable nature of all worlds - real and imagined; the intrinsically enigmatic character of everything: real, imagined, and dreamed.”

Ducornet’s imaginative and eloquent realisation places this luminous novel high in the realm of fiction by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.



The Garden of Eden

Before leaving, I just wanted to advance an hypothesis about the mythical structure of the novel.

The Garden of Eden has a major symbolic role in the novel. However, the death of Nicolas’ parents has both a Biblical and a Freudian significance:

Father - Adam
Mother (Odille) - Eve
Thomas (her adulterous lover) - the snake, a surrogate for Nicolas
Nicolas - Oedipus.

Odille is portrayed as a beautiful, vivacious and sexually active woman:

“She was our sea of trouble
Our water of life;
She was all our dirty weather;
Everyman’s wife.

She was all our shipwrecks,
Black moon and star.
Yet she shined upon our lives
Like the lamp above the bar.

…
O holiest of terrors -
Strongest drink and reddest meat -
The wasp’s nest of that
Woman’s sex was sweet.”

She is also described as “the Virtuous Abyss”, which represents ambiguity.


January 28, 2017

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bathed in this book and it was a tub replete with bubbles both sweetly lavender scented and noxious, silken water that took its time serpentining over my body, fantastical and ephemeral bubbles that gave my eyeballs rides to places alien and familiar, and a drain that was a fount of prehensile amphibians making a bee-line for my genitals (slimy, toothed, arousing).

Précis: An orphaned boy grows up in a seaside French town populated with outrageous characters – old salts spinning wild tales, a mother figure who’s a whiz in the kitchen, a much loved chimp, etc. – until one day while at sea he falls into his own reflection seeking a fabled sea sprite (who is in effect his unknown mother, a whorish Venus) and upon rescue spends the next 40 years asleep (and rampantly dreaming). He sleeps through both World Wars. While asleep he attracts the attention of a somewhat rogue Freudian (female) doctor who through unorthodox methods helps the boy (now a child man) regain his footing in life after awakening in the Vietnam War era.

That is the novel’s barebones plotline but it’s told in a way that nearly obviates time, or at least reduces it to near inconsequence, by flashback and stories told within stories told; a mirroring effect that situates reality within the subjective mind. It is profoundly disturbing in its vision of humanity and nature as psychotically rapacious, but it also elevates the powers of the human imagination - in its characters and in its very telling, its richly fevered style – so that in the end it becomes more a hymn to the powers of survival through personal vision and perseverance than a cynical dirge, however much the psychic rot abides.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Indebted to Oliver Sacks’s sleeping-sickness favourite Awakenings (quote from him on the cover), the third of Ducornet’s elemental teratology takes place in a surreal underwater landscape populated by salty, tale-spinning eccentrics. Despite the lyrical opening chapter, the inventive stream of surreal images and tangents, and the wildly comedic dialogue, I couldn’t follow The Fountains of Neptune along its rocky, circuitous paths without a sense of magical ennui gradually setting in. The relentless fantasia of this submarine dreamworld untethers the novel to any greater purpose, any sense of narrative progression or moments of clarity, and although Ducornet’s writing is as lyrical and crazy as always, I couldn’t immerse myself in this world as I could in her other brackish tale, Phosphor in Dreamland. Reluctantly dropped on p178 with a disappointed sigh.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the best of the handful of Ducornets I've read, but spending time immersed in any of her language-worlds is still better than 99.999% of whatever else you could be doing with your life.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, and I've already collected the other three novels in her Tetralogy of Elements. Count me in as a new member of the Rikki Ducornet fan club.

Quick as a hazel-hen, Other Mother, her skin smelling of roses and her apron of starch, busies about her hearth among the silvery laughter of her cutlery, her white dishes beached on her shelves like shells. I sit on Totor’s knee in the green honey of the room, watching coals crumble to ashes, and listen to pigeons singing in their jackets. Totor pulls out his tobacco pouch from his pocket and prises the shavings with fingers so sea-worn they no longer have prints. [16]

The word choice, the delicate alliteration, the imaginative imagery [‘His snoring made me think of walking on gravel at the bottom of a pool’, ‘Bottlenose’s voice was like a dead leaf swept along a gutter in the wind’] -- it begs to be read aloud, if not, to linger over the words, playing them over in your mind-- ‘dishes beached on her shelves like shells.’

The story, such as it is, revolves around a man, Nicholas, who, having experienced the trauma of witnessing his mother’s murder, descends into a many decades-long coma, sleeping through both World Wars. What he dreams during these decades, what sort of dreamlife he experienced -- that appears to be the focus of the novel, a narrative of his dreamquest, a reconstruction of his strange life in the land of Nod.

This is a feast for word-hounds, an extraordinary bit of imagination. I needn't say more.

[tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waters of allusion and myth drip off every page, permeating this slim, saturated fable. Distant oceans overlap, bleeding iron red. Blankets of fog mist over memory, spawning green algae demons and invoking reflected goddesses of the virtuous abyss. Oceans of shark and fish spill over into oceans of stars, flooding deeper the waters of sleep and dreams, wombs and death.

Navigating wherever it wishes, internal light filters freely, cleverly disguised as a spectral moon. Illuminated under liquid moonbeams, floating in a boat with mother and father, and mother’s lover; father’s assassin. Witness to the beginning of the end, made speechless. Everyone driven into mass hysteria and world war, repeated. Wake up! Time for a new story. Create a new world. Elaborate, decorate, procreate a kingdom within. Too small to enter. God’s dilemma.

“Arm in arm, light and darkness dance upon the water.”

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her best, so surreal but filled with deep sadness. There are two dueling storytellers in this book, one speaking of oppression and horror and the other tales of wonder and bitter sweetness. These are the dueling spirits in Ducornet’s books. Sadness fills this book even at its most surreal moments. A boy sleeps through the world wars and drowns in his own world and memories. More than a hint of Bruno Shultz in these pages. Possibly the best of her Elements Quartet, which is maybe her greatest accomplishment and one of those tragically ignore moments in literature.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

I know, I know. It's about dang time I actually get one of Rikki's lovely books read. This has been a good year for my introductions to by-me previously never read authors and Rikki's close to the next-top of the list. Honest. Honest. --myself, some time ago.


Just another instance of the sickness of our book culture, no? Look at Ducornet's numbers..... One day we will collectively awaken and discover all the BURIED wonders which have passed under our nodding heads.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ducornet's water novel: a swirl of sailors' tall tales, the liquid media of memory and dream, the black waters of the 20th century. Occasionally melts entirely into associative image lists, beautiful if slippery, and while individual side tales become fascinating (including the central psychoanalytic mystery of the protagonist's childhood) these dissolve in the overall design of the novel in which the stories and characters seem subsumed by concept, something I've noted before in these earlier Ducornets, elegant but, to me, unurgent, slippery, distanced for all their flickers of warmth. There's so much here, a dense weave of interconnected ideas, but I remain outside it. The spell remains incomplete. And psychoanalysis, for all its period relevance, remains a flawed lens.

[Chris Via]

“To survive the world we must all be lucid dreamers” (190).

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sexuality begins at conception. Alright, so I’m panning a pro-life shibboleth. The clinical psychoanalytical truth, an estimable hurdle for the adult mind down to the day, is that children are sexual creatures. Contrary to conventional superstition, it does not emerge in the Sturm und Drang of puberty, it is everything enswaddled from day one. Formidable mechanisms of repression cordon this as a “zero tolerance” taboo zone because they don’t know the difference between talking about the sexuality of something and directly sexualizing the object. Such fear and censoriousness betray an inveterate unwillingness to probe one’s own sexuality, which results in a Pandora’s box of debilitating symptoms as evidenced by, well, haven’t you seen enough of the goddamned sick world?

“MOMMY!!”

Any prurient hack can write about sex; Ducornet, in my experience, is peerless in the act of suffusing prose with seduction.* Adjectives abound in the blurbs: “sensuous,” “hypnotic,” “enchanting,” and of course “erotic,” all true enough. But they fail to capture the full effect by which she sculpts a universe of subjectivity in which anything can become a libidinally charged Proustian madeleine. Or again, differently: her semantic universe throbs with passionate attachments, boundless cathexis, unruly elective affinities, incorrigible partial drives. Look elsewhere for smut. Ducornet is a midwife of literary bliss.

Here, noise and history are reworked into music and memory. The prose is buoyant but it will not sweep you away; you cannot simply surrender to the current and expect to reach new worlds. Her writing is less like the stream of consciousness flood than succulent wine drip-fed one precise articulation at a time. The first part of the novel was rather slow going for me, but the finished text is fully rewarding. I must confess that her style is not exactly my forte and I have to exert some discipline to keep my mind from wandering. However, I tend to forgive any deficits I rightly or wrongly perceive if a book lingers and inclines me to brood, proving that I may be “done” with it but it’s not done with me. Such is the case here. In absolute honesty, the night after I finished reading it I had a dream (nightmare?) in which I witnessed my lubricious feelings towards my wife be ventriloquized by my son.

Sleep is overrated.


*C/o The Ticklish Subject, p. 242: “This crucial distinction between simulacrum (overlapping with the Real) and appearance is easily discernible in the domain of sexuality, as the distinction between pornography and seduction: pornography ‘shows it all,’ ‘real sex,’ and for that very reason produces the mere simulacrum of sexuality; while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing.”

[Δημήτριος Καραγιάννης · Rating 3 out of 5]

Magical realism in its purest form. Ducornet's story grows like a tree does, with numerous branches sprouting and extending almost everywhere, in chaotic fashion. This is a highly creative book with an unstoppable, unique flow that never ceases, and with characters that absolutely yearn for life and love.

[Cathie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written story, at times raucous and funny, but even more melancholic and infused with a deeply empathic sensibility vis a vis the world and its inhabitants. Highly recommend, but it won’t be to everyone’s liking. So it goes with what I like to call “the good stuff” of which this is definitely an example.

[Stephanie Golisch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this several times, and it remains my favorite book. Deceptively simple, it's a lyrical exploration of the nature of obsessional memory and the long-lasting effects of childhood trauma.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I mean this: I am only interested in the allusive messages of my dreams, the innumerable spaces of my memories, and the perpetual wanderings of my thoughts.”

Yep.

[Katrinka · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I was getting impatient with this one, but then the second half got things going again. There's no doubt about it: Ducornet is a true word stylist!

[Zoe Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cruel, unusual, and wondrous book.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

--This is the story of a 9 year old boy who lapses into a coma that lasts 50 years. Once awakened he recreates his life using stories of his past and memories. Should that sound clinical, sterile, or bland (or, perhaps 'flowery') please allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
--Ducornet lyrically crafts this tale of longing and heartache with such brilliant force that I may need to take a few days off before cracking the cover of whatever book has the now-misfortune of following The Fountains of Neptune on my reading list. The book hang-over is THAT potent.
--I must admit that I was a bit confused for the first sixty or so pages as the developing story seemed to have nothing at all to do with the first 3 pages. Thankfully, I kept reading, otherwise I would have robbed myself of really beautiful writing of the caliber for which I doggedly search.
--Put another way, this quality of writing is why I read. I seek it out. I savor it. Give this one a chance. I think you will agree.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Ducornet I find extremely satisfying. She writes sentences that have turns and eddies and complexities that enchant me. She has an imagination that is thorough, deep, rich, ornate. She writes about madness and sanity with respect, with the ambiguity of a master teacher. She respects her characters enough to give them a dignity regardless of their class, education, and station in life.

The awakening that Nini discovers through the course of his extinguished [sic] life has the profundity of Edgar in King Lear. The rich dream life, the fountains of Neptune, circulate between reality and fantasy, between delirium (d'Elirium in the novel) and experience.

Ducornet has great complexity and richness and maturity here. I will read any novel that she writes.

[Pauline Schmidt-West · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely adore Rikki Ducornet, especially her novels Gazelle and Netsuke, both of which I never wanted to end.

For me, The Fountains of Neptune was slightly less satisfying but it is enchanting - exasperating - utterly dreamlike, utterly worthwhile.

Her pages are fever dreams, with hallucinatory turns of phrase and delightful/surprising metaphors, ideas, associations - and here, also, a song.

Tom Waits is one of my favorite singer-songwriters and I can't resist imagining him singing her words:

"She was our sea of trouble
our water of life;
she was all our dirty weather;
everyman's wife.

She was all our shipwrecks,
black moon and evil star.
Yet she shined upon our lives
like the lamp above the bar.

She drank us down like water -
our mischief was her cure; she!
Our mastabas and our lure!
O holiest of terrors -
strongest drink and reddest meat -
the wasp's nest of that woman's sex
was sweet.'"

[Andreas Jacobsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgia, fairytales and saltwater.

Rikki Ducornets tale of water is presented in two halves.

The novel's first half is a deep dive into fantastical myths of the sea, absorbed with wonder by the wide-eyed young narrator, a child of about 10 years.
In the local tavern, colorful characters tell the boy - an ever-attentive listener - of all sorts of pirate-laden adventures, exotic shanties and jewel-encrusted dreamscapes.

The second half of the novel is told by this same boy, on the emergent side of a 50-year long coma - a child's mind wrapped in the cloth of an old mans overripe body.

Like the two first books in Ducornet's 'Tetralogy of Elements', this one is almost worth reading for the inventive playfulness of the language alone. Every single page is soaking in aquatic metaphors, as was the case with fire in the former novel.

However Ducornet has more to her writing.
The novel drips with thematic underpinnings: the meaning of storytelling, the role of memory in identity, the immediacy of consciousness and the connection between dreams and reality.

Not to mention: I was genuinely touched by a scene involving toy monkeys.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

my very favorite dalkey archive book. about a childhood that, sure, is rough, but also one where people love you and that makes a lot of difference.

[Leesi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surreal, sad, strange, hilarious... Definitely worth re-reading.