Phosphor in Dreamland

by Rikki Ducornet

Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet’s dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland , explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island’s seventeenth-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island’s exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza. The Jade Cabinet , Ducornet’s novel that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was described by one reviewer as “Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll.” Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Fantasy, American, Magical Realism, Literature, The United States Of America

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

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

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extravagant!
Like Nabokov, Rikki Ducornet delights in the use of vibrant language. Unlike Nabokov, she has been hiding in plain sight for years. I had to ask myself why I haven't read her work before. What took me so long?

Segments of this novel reminded me of the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (Especially the use of inventions as a source of wonder, i. e. the juxtaposition of science and magic). The world the author invents is full of surprise and delight, myths and images that linger in the mind. The atmosphere is masterfully conjured and book is short and poetic: as digestible as one of Marquez's shorter works. Its characters exist in a mystic alternate reality, where Jonathan Swift existed, but the trappings of the every day world have fallen away. Like Gulliver's Travels, this book engages the reader's imagination in a discussion of the outer limits of animal and botanical diversity, presenting us with variance and variety until our senses are awash. At the same time it hints with a subtle comment or two that society's strictures and mankind's foolish confidence are not as foolproof as we might imagine.

This book is more about texture, language, imagery, symbols and theme than it is about character. The caricatures within it are more vehicles for the colors and erotic underpinnings than typical people. Ducornet casts the spell of an enchantress with her intense evocations of island life, and I wanted the book to go on longer. Luckily, her other works are supposedly a treasure trove of similar delectations.

Lush imagery, man versus the animal kingdom, man versus man, historical aura, and finally, shamelessness!

Read something different for once, try out this novel!

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...sleeping minds are the crystal balls of some other universe."

This is a brief but vivid and evocative dream of a book. Ducornet's prose is magical, musical, and masterful. The Fountains of Neptune is still my favorite but we'll see if I can change that with more Ducornet. Finishing this one gives me an excuse to buy another.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revised the below original removing one star to a 3. This being the day after I find myself feeling a disappointed lingering after taste. The memory of the book is one of thinness. Up until the last one fifth I was enchanted by Ducornet's weaving of sensual imagery into the set world she constructed. This also worked so well in her other books I have read. Here at the end the sensuality overflowed the bounds of the narrative obscuring it and becoming all there was. It drained for me all the enjoyment of the previous writing. This is an experience, or at least to this degree, that I've never had before. I will at least consider that this may have been written as humorous but a humor I didn't get.


3.5 averaged up to 4.0 due to its sonorous precise language and its reminder of A.S. Byatt's particular style. I believe they wrote around the same time? A matter of taste but for me this didn't quite measure up to Gazelle, Jade Cabinet or Neptune. I would still recommend it for those who enjoy languishing in the beauty of words.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excessive in its language, its thematic ambitions, its (nerdy) eroticism (I mean there is some genuine eroticism here, but most is decidedly bookwormy, for the bookworm in love with textures of language and imagery and theme); excessive in nearly everything but length, which I suppose makes it excessive in its compression, but it’s a swiftly flowing compression, a decoction that goes down like a translucent juice, with a kick that leaves one clear-headed. Would you expect anything else from a book titled Phosphor in Dreamland? Many no doubt will find it cloying. Understandable. But I happen to like work that dares to cloy, that cloys even (but only to more thoroughly intoxicate and transport). Ducornet is an encyclopedic concentrator. In 165 pages she covers the development of a poet, the emergence of science in the 17th c. age of quasi-science and magic (while remaining magical), the rise of extreme religious intolerance, the medusa-like allure of the erotic feminine, a fantastical history of early photography and the desire for cinema 300 years before its invention, nature vs. civilization, etc. And to lighten the potential burden of all these themes she leavens it with humor, that again I can see rubbing some readers the wrong way, but again I relish her daring to put off. Ducornet is maximalist to the max, and this book is exactly what I would expect from her photographs – an exotic sexy bookish loveliness capped with an excess of curly raven locks.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some reviewers that are allegedly named Cody may tongue-lash this novel for rehashing themes and material better utilized in the Rikkis that came before and the Rikkis that came after. These hard-to-please Codys are not necessarily mistaken.

Is this one as sexy and grungy as The Stain, with it's Angela Carteresque wolves, its sadistic nun with a mechanical hand, its lugubrious and lecherous exorcist, its heady mixture of fairy tale, carnal imagery, zesty wordplay, religious satire and acrobatic raunch? No, Cody, you've got Rikki's number there.

Is it the staggering achievement that is The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis De Sade, which through a series of perfectly executed experiments in form (a heartbreaking trial transcript, luxurious and profound excerpts from a destroyed novel, an uncanny parroting of the Marquis De Sade's inner monologue) attacks the enemies of the imagination and makes a hero out of that famous French pervert? I'm sorry, Cody. Rikki fucked up.

Is it as taut and ruthless as Netsuke, with its crackling succession of sublime sentences that pushes the reader away like a wintry gale and then crystallizes into a pellucid prison wherein its condemned characters act out dangerous games of sexual control? Christ, Cody, this novel ain't that.

Is it at least as good as Rikki's first masterpiece, The Jade Cabinet, in which a pair of sisters named Memory and Etheria (both taught by the misunderstood author of Alice In Wonderland to find life wondrous) are pitted against a lifeless industrialist and his mistress, a demonic hunger artist? Cody, have you even read this one?

So what does Phosphor In Dreamland have to offer? A whimsical frame narrative that gleefully celebrates impossible bestiaries and Darwinian rationality? A clubfooted poet raised by a jabberwocky of a mendicant monk? A featherbrained and carelessly cruel aristocrat? The anachronistic invention of a 17th century camera? A baggy plot of failed ecological conquest? Redemption through art and vigorous mutual sexual gratification? What else? Bird sex, sacrilege spiced with scatology, page after page of sentences that do their best to mimic lit strands of firecrackers, stirred loins for undergrads that can't get enough of postcolonial litcrit? Cody, I am carefully typing this sentence with my tongue so that I may better tear my copy of this failed novel into confetti--confetti that will be mailed promptly to its publisher, that damned Dalkey Archive, in the hopes that they will forward this stillborn to its mother, that damned Rikki Ducornet.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cabinet of Marvels

For much (3/4) of this short novel, I wondered whether Rikki Ducornet was merely treading water or going through the motions. There was little to differentiate this novel from earlier works. Had she become a one trick pony, even if it was a pretty impressive trick to start with? However, by the last quarter of the book, she seemed to have regained her creativity and injected it into the narrative.

The dreamland of the title is an allusion to the fictive island of Birdland, which seems to be located in the tropical Caribbean. It has experienced a period of decline, partly as a result of the Grand Inquisition, which attacked its sensuous aboriginal culture (in this context, the novel resembles parts of “The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition”).

The unnamed narrator is investigating and documenting the contents of a museum/library, which contains numerous curious and marvelous objects in the manner of a Wunderkabinett (cabinet of curiosities) or a Wunderkammern (cabinet of marvels).

Male Meets Female

[A Note on the Narrator's Gender

The narrator of the novel appears to be a male, given the reference on page 3 to his boyhood (though little if anything concrete can be inferred from the relationship with the artist, Polly, in the last chapters. If we know little about the gender of the narrator, we know even less about their sexuality). I’ll nevertheless assume the narrator is a he.]

He comments on the artifacts in a journal, which is addressed to his friend and cosmologist colleague, Ved Krishnamurti.

Most of the sensuous prose in the first three quarters of the book is devoted to these descriptions of a “world of wonders”, some of which reveal a feminine aspect: (“the Eternal Feminine: moist, mossy, hidden, nameless. I hurry into darkness.”) On the other hand, like Swift’s Gulliver, infinitely curious man “devours with his [phallic] eyes” and endeavours to order and catalogue the world “for the sake of history and harmony.” However, up to this point, there’s little reason for a reader to make an investment in this prose (“I cover these pages with ink yet have no inkling why”), unless you count the reification of the objects (which require their own reliquary).

A Magical and Pornographic Universe

The narrator interweaves with these descriptions a brief history of Birdland (as at a time over three hundred years ago), though he suspects that it is more accurately called a “revery”, for it “reads like a romance” and in many places like a (creation) myth. He alleges that the inquisitor, Rais Secundo, was responsible for an act of vandalism in destroying the “magnificent opus” of Phosphor, a poet who invented an ocularscope with which he recorded life in Birdland (“my black box seizes reality, it does not reveal anything”)(or, in the words of a critic, “it was an attempt to seize and fix a universe in constant flux”), in a style that was “magical but pornographic”. The photographic plates are referred to variously as being “some of the world’s most astonishing erotica” and as portraying “lascivious nudes and multifarious copulations”.

A Place of Infinite Wonders

Even Phosphor’s stepfather accuses him of trying to “steal the world from God”. Both words and images are deemed so threatening that even now, 300 years later, the puritanical “Clean Sweepers” (“torn asunder by patriotism and their hatred of the sensual world and its sexual determinisms”) have stormed the museum in order to destroy these “obscene” artifacts: “The universe is a place of infinite wonders...If the marvelous incites wonder, it also evokes fear.” This book is an attempt to preserve this cultural heritage, if only in words (accompanied at the end by some of Polly’s drawings).

Incandescent Vision

The language improves progressively, becoming more sensual in the last quarter, as Phosphor manipulates his way towards his love interest, Extravaganza Tardanza, who bathes “her succulent body in a water scented by gardenias”:

“Starved and weary, the party arrived at [ the city of] Pope Publius in the middle of an afternoon so wretchedly hot the entire population was fast asleep in the deep cool of bedchambers tiled and shuttered, or open to shaded gardens where cool fountains played, filling the air with a chill vapour.”

“Guided by fire, informed by desire, the vision incandesces and the poems catch fire”:

“The universe
Is a poem
Of love.
The stars themselves
Are voluptuous
Inscriptions,
As are the clouds,
The salt water, the leaves.
Each tree is a book
Of pleasures.”

“In Extravaganza’s arms, his torment was melted down and reduced to a sweet honey that she extracted fearlessly. Her tender body gave itself utterly and unabashedly; being simple and, having no notion of evil, she was Edenic animal seized by heat. Her eyes and cunt wept with happiness; her breasts filled the poet’s mouth like those magical fruits that are renewed as they are eaten. The feast was an eternal feast, or so it seemed, and the nights they spent together, all too swiftly done, somehow sprawled into infinity, abolishing not only terror but self and time...Standing stark naked and quivering before her mirror, and slapping her sweet ass with her open palms, she would cry, as if surprised: “I am a human female!”

“There is no Heaven, only this one life. It is a fire rekindled each time lovers embrace with hunger.”

This work isn't Ducornet at her best, but she does redeem herself by the end (as I hope the above extracts illustrate).


Such is the Way of Love
[After Rikki Ducornet]

"[Phosphor] made a little list of rhymes to keep for later: thorn/sworn, latch/patch, fur/burr, thistle/whistle."

Love had always been a prickly thorn
‘Fore I met the one to whom I’m sworn.
Now I’ve swapped a key for a metal latch,
There’s no more rutting in the strawb’rry patch
My one true love made me this coat of fur:
It protects me from both briar and burr.
If I were home, I’d walk through fields of thistle
With nought in my ears but my own whistle.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have an almost supernatural aversion to the word ‘turd.’ Just doesn’t sit right with me; rolls off the tongue wrong and plops on the floor like, well, what it is. ‘Shit’ is fine, as are most of its variants. The word just drives me scrambling for cover.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Phosphor in Dreamland didn’t do much for me, as strewn and littered with the word “turd” as there are fish in the sea. Two-thirds Quixotic journey, the last act turns into a wholly different beast. Dare I say erotica? I don’t know, it just seemed like a lot of cruise control. A holding pattern wherein Ducornet, a writer of rare talent, fell back on old habits rather than trying anything new.

To put it another way: at one point, a tertiary character is “ejaculating into the open wounds of the Christ…ejaculating into the anus of the Pope.” Is this supposed to offend, titillate, entertain? ‘Cause, truth be told, it does none of the three to me. It’s just boilerplate Ducornet—the sacred profaned by her magical alchemy of Gnosticism, fairytale, and paganism. When that triumvirate works, t’aint easy to touch her. But here, after the nth “cock” has penetrated the umpteenth “cunt” in some new-fangled position I’m frankly too old and physically inflexible to try, I appreciate the brevity of the book.

Nathan and MJ, both my betters, loved it, so I’m going to figure this is a ‘wrong book, wrong time’ situation. Coming off of the high of Genoa, it was a pretty thankless task I handed Rikki. Ducornet would, of course, go on to write The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition and Netsuke, masterpieces both. I’m looking at this as a small sidetrack while she shook off the tetralogy and expanded her scope.

Verdict: not a 'turd,' but hardly 'the shit.'

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Possibly my favorite Rikki so far. Stands to reason given that Swift is firmly in the background. And footnotes.

Living in a hole like I do, one must occasionally correct one's perspective and proportionality. If you stood where I stand you'd think Rikki were the hottest ticket since she left that guy her number (or vice versa?). But her graph is in the decline. Back in the '90's, after graduating from the school of Dalkey she would seem to have attracted NYC's attention. But now you see she's back in Small Pressville with her new one coming from Coffee House. And look at those paltry numbers. Netsuke (her hottest number) gets 366 gr=ratings. You'd think there'd be a more reasonable use of a word like "goldfinching". I'll confess I don't champion a large stable (old greek: pantheon) of female authors -- Young, Ducornet, Caponegro, Maso, Place -- but frankly look at their numbers. And then look at what they do. It's fantastic ;; (I begin to believe it's not a sexism issue, it's a how issue ;; free imagination scares people). So, persisting in this little corner of gr like we do, you'd think Ducornet were all the rage (her new one, Brightfellow, was released weeks ago and has a count of 12-5 ;; but thankfully none of those disaster=reviews from knutgalley). Yes folks, numbers do tell you something, should you ask the right question. But I'm as guilty as the next ; I don't even have a copy of that new one yet ;; a thing which I will deliciously correct.

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

A poet and inventor's attempts to capture the natural and human wonder of his island home, in words and in early improvised photography, lead him on a journey across his world and afoul of local elements of pious hypocrisy opposed to both dreaming and eroticism. This has some promise, and indeed frequently sparkles with well-honed description or turn-of-phrase, but the novel is overburdened with clumsy whimsy and a sort of cleverness or wit that falls a little flat or misdirected to my ear. In particular, many of the ludicrously-named characters are little more than ridiculous grotesqueries that quickly become tiresome. There is pathos in them, too, but not always enough to temper their annoyance. And the framing story -- a historian writing the narrative as letters to a friend and colleague -- seems to serve as little besides a probably unintended narrative distancing.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magical, delicious, fishy novel.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy mackerel, what a lovely, lovely book. Rikki Ducornet writes a brilliant, poetic prose, romantic and delicate and strange as a surrealist's dream. Belongs on the shelf with Li-Young Lee's The Winged Seed and Jeanette Winterson at her most poetic.

[javor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. It was a blast to read at first and started off really strong, but seemed to lose both momentum and direction around halfway through; Ducornet’s extravagant, sensuous language got a bit droning after a while. In a way it felt like a total unabashed rip-off of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The magical realist prose was very dramatic but lacking in inventiveness, repeating the same themes for most of the book, making it feel unfocused and hard to follow, sometimes seeming more like an exercise in ‘exotic’ magical realist prose than in actual storytelling. There were definitely themes: the destruction of ecosystems in colonization, the profane incorporation of the Real in the creation of photography, the violence inherent to nation-building, the dangers of exoticization, the violence of museums in tearing artifacts from their lived contexts and freezing them in a timeless, textual description, the relationship between private sexuality, sexual politics, pornography, and the gaze; and probably more that I missed. But somehow, despite the themes, it just felt like kind of a pointless read. I’m not sure what I should have gotten out of this.

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I really, really wanted to like this more than I did. I mean, I appreciate the exoticism of it, the images, the decadence; there are some moments of interesting frisson. But, on the whole, the novel just doesn't really do much. rather it languishes, it goes on, nothing much really happens--it peaks interest here and there, but it failed ever to engross. I guess I liked the other novel of hers that I read before better, it did have more of a plot, more compelling characters. Still, I'll keep on reading Ducornet--I just hope the others are more like the first one I read. But maybe I didn't like that one all that much either--for I can't seem to remember what it's called. Anywho, the world is collapsing and here I am reading books I can't even remember the title of only a couple of months on. Is it really only a couple of months since I read the other one? Seems like I've been in quarantine for years. And blah blah blah. It's nice being out of work and having more time to read, but it's damned hard to concentrate with all the static of the year of Covid-19. At least we got rid of Trump.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book jacket suggests that this is "Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges," but I'll go one further and suggest that this is also "Sexing the Cherry meets Don Quixote via The Tempest".
The prose is rich and brilliant like avocado; as decadent as bitter chocolate. For some, it will be an acquired taste.
This is whimsy and lyricism and eroticism and imagination all elegantly entwined into a phantasmagorical wonderland of a story.

[Jake Beka · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy to read this novel! Ducornet’s linguistic skills are scrumptious. Also definitely one of the most humorous novels I have read this year. Turds, anuses, dreamed phallic body parts that look like the face of God. Great stuff here. Can’t wait to read more work by her!

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing was beautiful: a really perfect ode to pagan sensuality and feral strangeness. For Phosphor, corporeality turns into pure meaning and intention:

Now that Phosphor was both dreaming and embracing a dreamer, the world became a poem--that is to say, he no longer saw himself as one who translates the real into poetry, but one who transcribes the poetry of the real. "The universe," he whispered to his beloved in her embrace, "is a poem of love. The stars themselves are voluptuous inscriptions, as are the clouds, the salt water, the leaves. Each tree is a book of pleasures" (149).

The world is already, if you will, a language--or language.

As the historiographer's rendering of the island deepens, there is a somewhat gradual shift from otherness to inclusion. Is it that the world becomes increasingly anthropomorphized--that is, more subjugated to human meaning, intelligible to us through language and metaphor? In support of this, the animals of Birdland are not "beastly," but more human than the human characters at times: the enigmatic loplop, for instance, begs for his or her life in human cries. Ducornet's beasts are not beastly.

Or is it that humanity has yielded to otherness, and discovered the otherness of the human, and of language, as well? What about the relationship between the intensely corporeal and dreams? As Rais Secundo, the Inquisitor, writes in his condemnation of Phosphor's camera and poetry, "Luste and dreaminge, I have ascertained, are inexorably joined."

In terms of just reviewing this though, I found the novel a bit uneven: it really comes into its own after the first 80 pages or so, and the last third of the novel--after Phosphor returns to Pope Publius--reads like an extended prose poem. It really is that good. But the beginning feels extraneous. The whole expedition part kind of does, but I suppose the second half of the novel compensates for it, if not justifies it. The authorial layering helps to explain this, too. Because you are getting the "story" from the historiographer, there are reasons for the shift to bliss and meaning, and also reasons for the attempt at a drier account of the ocularscopic mission and Phosphor's early life.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few years ago, this was the first book I ever added on Goodreads. I'm not sure why exactly, but I put off reading it for years--at first because I wanted to save it for myself as a treat, then (as as I became less interested in more stylized writing over the last few years) because I was worried it would be full of interesting things but dry and overwritten. Both of those impressions are true: there are lots of interesting ideas in this book, moments of extreme strangeness, and lots beautiful writing, but there's also very little sense of real human beings or narrative momentum. It's sort of like a structured cabinet of wonders, reminiscent in a lot of ways of the writers the blurbs compare Ducornet to (Borges and Angela Carter particularly) but unstructured in an unpleasant way and sort of laborious and treacly to read. Interestingly, I was more interested in the erotic elements of the book than the conceptual ones, which make me want to come back to Docortnet's writing at some point since they seem to be even more prominent in her recent work, though I'm not sure when that would be.

[Robert Wechsler]

For a while I thought this novella was just brilliant, but after another while I felt that I was watching a display of brilliance that consisted mostly of random images and thoughts, and the spell was broken because this sort of randomness bothers me. I read a third of the novella before moving on.

[jeremiah]

A novel with quite a bit going on, Ducornet's Phosphor in Dreamland is, in some sense, the creation of a world without God, or, at least, some a religious deity; however, there is still a powerful, mechanistic force underlying "Birdland," the island Ducornet creates and whose history the narrator details. This force is a sort of eroticism and sensuality. Significant attention is given to the island's animal and plant life so as to draw one into this world, and yet, in the foreground, is human sexuality. Through her characters, Ducornet dismisses God, as one character exclaims that "there is no Heaven...only this one life. It is a fire rekindled each time lovers embrace with hunger" (132). Further, the novel's discorporate Jonathan Swift scholar at one point is referred to as having said that "It is sexual love that liberates the libido and sets the lover to dreaming. And so, becoming..." (138). The idea of "becoming" through sex suggests, to me anyway, that the island had, in retrospect, grown because there is a human presence to "eroticize" it.

This idea of growth as dependent on human sexuality is tied to the novel's primary tension: the capturing and preservation of history through language. The novel's narrator is documenting the world in which the eponymous Phosphor helped create, began to preserve, as he helped contribute to the island's library. Phosphor began documenting the island himself through his invention of a camera obscura. The island, or growth and becoming itself, is captured by humans, but Ducornet doesn't attribute nature to a God; instead, she gestures back toward the human being, in some way, and the human being continues to forward this becoming through its own trapping and preservation, language. The novel's apparent retrospective understanding of a world, sex, and language is ultimately reflexive of fiction itself.

[Fred · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eloquent language beautifully assembled in the form of a letter of sorts to a friend for the telling of a fairy tale/history of the life and demise of a lovelorn inventor turned poet.
This my second of Ducornet's novels, the first being 'Netsuke'. It bears mentioning that the two works share no commonalities in terms of style or focus. One would likely be hard-pressed to identify the author's "stamp" within these works. The fact that these two works are so dissimilar and yet so perfectly enjoyable thrills me.
I am almost giddy (that's right, I used the word 'giddy') with the excitement every avid reader feels when discovering a 'new' writer who plies her/his craft so beautifully and with such breadth of style thus wholly avoiding any semblance of 'formula'.
Give this book a try and decide for yourselves.

[Kamakana · Rating 2 out of 5]

120411: i do not think i will pick up books at random, figuring at least it is short, what can i lose? a few hours i will never get back. and i like angela carter...

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Farcical, beautiful, sad, joyous by turns. Ducornet's language is gorgeous throughout.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phosphor in Dreamland is the sixth novel I've enjoyed by author Ducornet, and each time I've praised her beautiful, exotic, enchanting prose in my wrap-up remarks.

Nowhere is this more on display than in Phosphor in Dreamland – her prose transports the reader to a realm at the very limits of our known reality, not quite overstepping, always retaining that bit of realism and humanity to keep us grounded. On a fictitious island, Birdland, an infant of mild deformities is left on the doorstop of Fogginius, hated and feared scholar and librarian. Christened as Nuno Alfa y Omega, but raised as Phosphor, poet, inventor, he becomes an admirer of the beautiful Extravaganza. Phosphor's pursuit of her is but one thread among many woven through the book.

In the pages of the all-too-brief novel, Ducornet manages to explore themes of power and submission, pornography versus art, obsessive love, species extinctions and nature exploitation, genius and madness, all told through a series of letters from one scholar to another relating the history and culture of the island of Birdland of 300 years earlier, and in particular the exploits of Nuno Alfa y Omega.

About the time I was finishing Phosphor in Dreamland, I was reacquainting myself with a few old favorites of mine from thirty+ years ago, science-fantasy author Jack Vance's twin epics The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld. I was immediately struck by the stylistic similarities and corresponding personal impressions of the prose of the two books. Two writers of incredible skill and imagination, Ducornet and Vance share an ear for the exotic word, turn of phrase, an eye for the grotesques, the aberrations among us, real or imagined, and a mental map of worlds and places not even dreamed of. This excerpt from Vance's 'Dying Earth' followed by one from Ducornet's 'The Fountains of Neptune':

“'I have known the Ampridatvir of old; I have seen the towers glowing with marvelous light, thrusting beams through the night to challenge the sun itself. Then Ampridatvir was beautiful-- ah my heart pains when I think of the olden city. Semir vines cascaded from a thousand hanging gardens, water ran blue as vaultstone in the three canals. Metal cars rolled the streets, metal hulls swarmed the air as thick as bees around a hive – for marvel of marvels, we had devised wefts of spitting fire to spurn the weighty power of Earth. . . But even in my life I saw the leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained with a minimum of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult.'” [81-82]

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 windsewn weeds, their rotting balustrades. Overgrown topiaries battling above the quiet pool where I saw my own reflection as beaked as any heron's. [163]

[Caleb Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of beautiful writing and 17th Century sleaze. This book is essentially two things: a survey of the fictional island Birdland in a mode that derives from Gulliver's Travels but with (a bit) more realism, and a constrained stage for a group of grotesques and eccentrics to bounce off one another. (Fogginius, a "turd"-obsessed holy quack, and bewigged thug Yahoo Clay are two of my favorites.) The framing conceit, that the book is a series of letters from a native of Birdland to an old friend, adds a nice layer to the story, because it helps the reader feel the sheen of history over the island, stretching both backward and forward from the era of wigs and Inquisitors.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tiresomely formulaic work of late postmodernism. Found documents, divided narrators, echoes of famous sources (Cervantes, Swift), faux-scholarly footnotes, parodies of Enlightenment encyclopedism, clashes between purportedly incommensurable worldviews, etc. All these ingredients could have made an interesting casserole, but instead the taste is relentlessly jaunty, forced, exclamatory and tedious. I've never read a Terry Pratchett novel because I get the impression it would be like this. It's nothing like Borges or any other more-distinguished reference points.

[The7ghost · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most magical stories i have ever read...would make neil gaiman give up writing...mildly erotic, extremely funny and touchingly beautiful, i found this at a free book table at Penn State and fell immediately in love...

[Leann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly, I didn't even finish this book--and that's saying something. Seventy pages into it, I just gave up. What are ya gonna do?

[Allyson Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another re-reading. I need some mad alchemy in my life, stat. Returning to it this time, it's not the same. Maybe I'm jaded.

[C. Lee Hodges · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mmm? Well written but feels unfinished and rushed. Interested in the author's other work now.

[tromboy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm putting together some kind of "contemporary grotesque canon". This summer, along with Flannery O'Connor's [i] Wise Blood [/i], Clive Barker's [i]Books of Blood: Vol. I[/i] and Eileen Myles' [i]Chelsea Girls[/i], I read [i]Phospor in Dreamland[/i] by Rikki Ducornet.

Coming from reading [i]The Stain[/i], I expected a lot from this novel. I don't think it actually reached the heights from that one. Which is kind of interesting when you think about how, in many cases, an author's work progresses towards simplification. I think about Borges and "El espejo y la máscara" or "Undr", the search for the absolut, for the representation. Which is, actually, one of the main themes in [i]Phosphor[/i]. But simplification is not the path that Ducornet draws from [i]The Stain[/i] to [i]Phosphor[/i]. [i]Phosphor[/i] is actually an overexaggeration of the main components that set the basis for Ducornet's aesthetic: metafiction, intertextuality, philosophic speculation and the grotesque. I think, in this case, the first three overpower the fourth one. And, as a consequence, the plot recoils. Also, Ducornet display her tecniques with much less subtlety. If in [i]The Stain[/i] you have a perfect example of interxtuality when you reach the wedding feast scene (which refers to those in the medieval grotesque), in [i]Phosphor[/i] you deal with explicit mentions of Jonathan Swift. If in [i]The Stain[/i] you have Edma's attempts to reproduce the Basilic on small scale, in [i]Phospor[/i] you have open discussions about the problem of representation adressed openly by the narrator. This makes seem the novel more like an exercise in Borges' writing than a true Ducornet novel.

It might seem like I hated the novel. Actually, not. When Ducornet is on, she's fucking on. When the plot took center of the stage, I quite enjoyed it. I like Cosima's storyline with the pirate prince. Fogginius' descent into dementia was kind of funny. The barber's episode (with the lôtlôt) was great (the whole events in Fantasma's journey around the island, actually). The Quijote's references (Phosphor-Pulco relationship, the letter episode) were quite excelent.