Here is the entire second chapter of Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum:Madeleine DreamsA GROTESQUELY FAT WOMAN lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam. There are many things to learn and appreciate about Shun-Lien Bynum’s style and wonderful writing. But one thing writers can learn from is how she makes use of white space. She doesn’t fill up the entire page with words. Many of her chapters consist of a few paragraphs. Some are as short as two or three lines. The longest chapters are two or three few pages in length. What does white space do?White space, like a frame, focuses the readers' attention. If you only have one paragraph to tell an entire story, every word and image in that paragraph becomes even more significant. Use of white space distills and concentrates the power of the words used. Shun-Lien Bynum’s description for example, of gathering up fat “just as another woman gathers up her skirts” is so vivid, I remember the image years after reading the book. Consider too, some of her chapter titles: beatific, blush, burn, performance, evasion. Substitute, inept, petted, unveiled, imposter. She chooses titles, which are evocative and work with white space because they call attention to the word and its many meanings. White Space, like silence allows the reader to absorb what’s being said. Without silence, you cannot hear music. Given the pace of life, I often find it hard to slow my mind down enough to enter a fictional world. To enter a dream, there’s a process. You don’t fall asleep instantly (at least I don’t). I need time to relax, for my mind to settle, for my thoughts to drift in order to enter the dream state. White space in writing can provide a sort of meditative silence an incident or a description that allows us to enter the world of the story more fully. White Space helps creates a rhythmPoets know this. They arrange lines very carefully knowing that where a line breaks or falls on the page affects how the reader interprets the meaning held in the lines. Madeleine is Sleeping has a poetic, almost hypnotic quality partly because Shun-Lien Bynum varies the amount of text between one chapter to the next, effectively structuring the book like a poet would, to suggest gaps as well as connects between one chapter and the next. Effective use of white space in writing can, when words are well chosen, make images more potent and words more evocative. White space can also help lull the reader into the world of the story of the story and variety of white space, like changes in tempo, defy expectations, and keep the reader moving forward to find out what’s next. If you haven’t read Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum it’s a wonderful book, filled with strange, unexpected, dream-like images. Really good prose, to my mind is also poetic, inventing or adapting new forms in order to tell a story that may or many not have been told before, in an entirely fresh way.
(review from http://Semper-Augustus.blogspot.com)In Madeleine is Sleeping, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum intentionally creates a narrative that cultivates the ambiguity between the reality and dream-life of the protagonist, Madeleine. The trouble readers may have in separating the two worlds is deliberate: the two story lines weave into each other until one can no longer find their peripheries. Madeleine's real life seems just as fantastic as her dream life. Moreover, the consequences of Madeleine's dream life are real. In The Washington Post, John Crowley writes: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.The story runs on a dream-logic, whose edges are soft, symbolic, sensual, whereas the dream-logic of Lewis Carroll, for instance, is hard, matter-of-fact, and sarcastic. The chapters are short, as if from fragments of half-remembered dreams. The story line is subtle and elliptical: each chapter proceeds from an echo of the previous chapter, often picking up from the thought encompassed in the last line.In the chapter Indivisible, Bynum writes:As a very small child, she was told the story of a tailor who, for fear of losing his shadow, secured it to himself with stitches. This is how she imagines it: a woman sitting in a chair, in the candlelight, cupping her ear, is stitched onto the woman standing here with a Sevres cup in her hand. And she knows that, as with all things sutured, the two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both. She is certain of it. Yet she persists in picking at the edges; she delights in seeing how the wound seeps, where the scab has been lifted away by a fingernail.If we think of dreams as shadows of reality, this becomes an allegory within Madeleine is Sleeping. The two worlds are not separated, but sutured together wherein one finds residue of reality in the dream world and vice versa.This book is surreal, grotesque, erotic, and yet light, whimsical, effervescent, innocent and Madeleine's emotional, artistic, and sexual journey is marked by a child-like urgency and bravery.
What do You think about Madeleine Is Sleeping (2005)?
Difficult to rate. Surreal, poetic, sexual, deviant - such an odd book. A very interesting read due to the lush, original writing and experimental style. Less appealing to me was the subject matter: flatulence, deformities, abuse, uncomfortable sexuality. I appreciated the blurr between reality and dream, and the dark fairytale feel, but would have liked more resolution to story lines. I hope the author writes more. Her writing is so incredibly beautiful that I finished the book, even though images and subjects were not so appealing to me.
—Martine Taylor
I generally don't reread books, but I've returned to this book many times to dip back in and savor individual pages that read, and look, like prose poems. This is one book I haven't put on the shelf after reading, but kept on my night stand since 2004. I have yet to articulate, let alone pinpoint the fascination, but there is something about Bynum's language that speaks to me like oracle, something akin to an ancient augury, birds taking flight to the east (or perhaps it's just the ative prose and the vivid characters: an obese woman who sprouts wings and floats above Madeleine's village, or Madeleine herself, dreaming wonder into being). A highly imaginative and original debut novel.
—Danna
Comas: a horror for those forced to see their loved one in that state and an intriguing in-between state for those in the coma. Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum presents the blur between the worlds of the sleeping and the waking.To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.In sleep, the borders between reality and dreams blurs for Madeleine and her family in provincial France. With images of a fat woman flying with her arm flaps and a girl made entirely of pastry kissed by a hopeful suitor, the difference between fanciful dreams and the real world blends to the point of it being difficult to discern what is actually real, yet the changes Madeleine goes through is still reflective of transformations that people go through when they grow up and experience the world.Presented in a more unique format with verse length chapters over typical prose length chapters, the story offers a visual draw into the narrative. The worlds that are built between the dream and reality are adequately developed with the aid of magic realism, but it could have used a bit more clarity on what was going on, particularly as the ending was a bit of a "WTF" moment; however, there were parallels decently drawn between the events of the dream and the events occurring in reality.
—Jen
