Dream of the bed chamber

the rooms too many for mortal use, chambers within chambers...

Did anyone get flashes of Huguette Clark?

From Wikipedia:

In February 2010, Clark became the subject of a series of reports on msnbc.com, which said caretakers at her three residences had not seen her in decades, and that her palatial estates in Santa Barbara, California, and New Canaan, Connecticut, had lain empty throughout that time, although the houses and their extensive grounds were meticulously maintained by their staff.

Some notes on Chapter 2

To bounce off Señor Sparks's questions in his last post: "Any thoughts on this? Are we left to drown on our own? Will we need to wipe an oily residue from our skin upon completion?"

I think our page-a-day (or chapter-a-week) pace helps us not drown. Reading only as much as I want each evening, closing the book when I feel "full" (or sense my brain's getting overloaded), I've reached the end of chapter 2, and I can say that I've thoroughly relished every page of the book so far—yup, all 37 of 1198 of 'em!

The "I" of chapter 1 recedes in chapter 2, and what we get is a wonderfully focused account of the narrator's invalided, opium-befogged mother and her loyal visitor, Mr. Spitzer. The prose is like a dream, and it describes a life that is largely indistinguishable from dreams.

Dreams are dangerous, of course; any fiction is like a dream already, and to have a dream contain a dream is to compound your challenges as a writer. Yet chapter 2 proves tremendously exciting. Its labyrinthine sentences packed with invention; every reiteration of the life-is-a-dream motif ("My mother pretended that the real was the dream, that the dream was the real," "My mother slept for years, her eyes protected from the vulgar sunlight because already her visions were too many, the mirages, the maelstroms...") had the strange (and good) effect of keeping me focused. And—best of all—the whole thing comes to a very satisfying conclusion. I felt like I'd read an entire novella within the novel. Will every chapter be such an exquisite adventure?

Purple

...Brooklyn Bridge like a purple lace glove reaching through the darkness...

A close call

From the dustjacket:

At one time in the Gare Lazare in Paris, seven suitcases of the manuscript were lost—but were retrieved by seven men from Cook's with seven wheelbarrows.

Miss MacIntosh, My Nightmare

I've been reading MMMD before bed, and last night I dreamt someone (an outsider) had posted a concise and devastating critique of my latest post. (I also dreamt that my building super's name meant "The One Who Sees.")

Vast excitement

The sentences! The sentences! I'm ascending Chapter 2 and the view is great. What a writer, lads! I love how the rhythm of the list here creates the atmosphere of that room and the weather inside the mother's head (the same thing).

Heavily laden with jewels as a Greek corpse, my mother, she who had retired from the brutal world, whose eyes were shielded against the vulgar sunlight, slept for tideless years which were her vast excitement, surrounding herself with a world of dreams, visions, phantoms, her bedroom as filled with visitors as the Grand Central Station, some from the shores of Hades, voices of the dead, faded movie stars of the silent flicker films, imaginary telephone operators plugging in at imaginary switchboards, spirits like long-nosed bird dogs, drowned pearl-divers, old kings, old queens, figures older than Oedipus or Troy, New England spinsters with faces checkered like chessboards, jockeys riding the skeletons of dead horses, angelic birds.

Can MY possibly sustain this pitch for the whole book?

What if she does?

What then?

*

I don't think the beginning of any long book has excited me this much. Can I say such things? I think I'm telling the truth.

Who wrote this?

In the beam of our anarchic head lights which barely cut through mist and darkness, there stood, by the side of the road, a tall man with a child perched on his lean shoulders, a double-headed man, staring at nothingness or beyond it. We were the intruders upon this plain of silence., and he shook his fist, listlessly, perhaps figuring the danger of walking on this road which now, suddenly turning, seemed to go back the way it had gone before. There was now no landscape.

Cormac McCarthy?

No—Marguerite Young! (From MMMD, Chapter 1)

Our hero(ine)