A Desert of Pure Feeling

by Judith Freeman

Book Overview

From the writer whose voice Carolyn See has characterized as one of the strangest, most distinguished in American fiction writing today ("There is really nothing to compare her with, except, maybe,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679432906
• ISBN13: 9780679432906
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A love story that explores the realities of love and loss.

In A Desert of Pure Feeling, Judith Freeman's character, Lucy, explores the worlds of being a mother, lover, and companion in the west. Freeman delves into the mind of Lucy, a now middle-aged woman, who has played all these roles and is striving to move on with her life while struggling to make sense of a tragic past. Freeman intermingles the past with the present, allowing the reader to fully understand what makes Lucy the woman she is. As a mother Lucy Patterson struggles with a sick infant son with a heart defect. After her son's death in Guatemala (he is a Mormon missionary who disappears after the bombing of the home of the missionaries) she is plagued by the past of being an unstable mother since giving birth to him at the young age of 19. She battles with the regret of being a self centered mother unable to focus time on her son. It was not until after he was gone that she realized how badly he needed it. Lucy's voyage through her past love life begins when she leaves her home on an Idaho ranch as a fiction writer to be the guest writer on an all expense paid trip on the Oceanus, an ocean liner aimed for shores of England. The Oceanus is the beginning of Lucy's trek back in time with the reunion of her love, Dr. Carlos Cabrera. Carlos is a well known surgeon who operated on Lucy's two-year-old son years earlier. Soon after the operation the two become lovers despite the gab in age. Their love for each other is strong, but their dedication to their separate families proves to be stronger. The lovers quickly lose contact with each other, but will never escape each other's thoughts. Their reunion aboard the Oceanus gives them a new start together. After twenty years it appears nothing has changed between them, and their love for each other proves to be as strong as ever, as they console each other after their losses: the disappearance of her son and the death of Carlos' wife. The affair again comes to a halt when Carlos' dark past of being a member of Hitler's Youth during the war comes out. Unable to face his past Carlos flings himself over the edge of the ocean liner to his death, leaving Lucy once again alone. Lucy flees to Las Vegas to the Tally Ho Inn in an attempt to make sense of her life and begin writing once again. Here Lucy meets Joycelle, a young hooker who has just discovered that she is HIV-positive and soon becomes Lucy's companion. Lucy forms a close bond with Joycelle and becomes her primary caretaker after her disease sets in. In a seeming attempt to make up for the lost time with her son, Lucy retreats to her Idaho ranch with Joycelle and spends Joycelle's last days together in the solitude of the west. Freeman's writing is surprisingly refreshing. It allows the readers to become the female character and play out her fantasies alongside her. Her description of Lucy's surroundings becomes tangible and real for the readers and lets them become emotionally attac

A contemporary love story portraying a western woman

Judith Freeman's "A Desert of Pure Feeling" is a contemporary love story that portrays a western woman with depth and dimension in her most intimate roles--as a daughter, wife, mother, friend, and lover. This compelling novel looks at the ways one extraordinary woman faces the task of gathering the evidence of the past into a meaningful awareness of the present. With honesty and courage, this woman searches her relationships and comes to know the secrets of her own heart. This is a western story, with a ranch in Idaho, the desert spaces of Utah, and the lure of Las Vegas. But the geography is not limited to the west. The sotry's primary setting is Las Vegas, in a motel called the Tally Ho, where Lucy, the main character and a writer, is speaking at a conference. Las Vegas was a familiar place to Lucy not only throughout her childhood vacations traveling through this city but because it was originally settled by her people and is symbolic to her of her Mormon upbringing. Lucy has traveled to Las Vegas from her home on an isolated ranch in the mountains of Idaho. At this conference she agrees to travel across the Atlantic on a ship in exchange for giving a reading during the voyage. "What I could not have known was how this decision would lead me back along the path of my own life, how it would open up old wounds and lay them bare and create new ones I hadn't expected" (13). On board she is shocked when she encounters Dr. Carlos Cabrera, the surgeon who many years ago had saved her son's life, the man to whom she had given her heart, and with whom she had hoped to share her life. The shipboard journey takes Lucy across the Atlantic Ocean and to London, filling in the crucial gaps in her relationship with Cabrera, helping her to understand the forces that have shaped this man. The ship encounters a violent storm at sea, and the motion is reflected in dangerous waves of another form. Traveling on to Cornwall, Lucy wrestles the demons from her past that threaten her hold on life. This is not a one-time reckoning, but as Lucy discovers, a process requiring both a yielding and a resistance. Judith Freeman has given us a novel that speaks to the challenge women face today in coming to terms with their own identities as revealed in their most intimate relationships. The author looks unflinchingly at the contradictions and complexity of human relationships as the character faces her role as a mother, a wife, a lover, a writer, and a human being struggling with loss. Once Lucy made choices that protected her heart; now life offers her the chance to risk loving with all her heart. To embrace love is to embrace loss, and Freeman traces Lucy's path to self-knowledge with strokes that resonate with the human yearning for meaning within ourselves and with others.

A novel with a bit of a twist

In Judith Freeman's A Desert of Pure Feelings, Lucy, the narrator, takes the reader on a wild adventure through the past several years of her life. The novel is torn between several different stories that do not occur in chronological order. As the reader begins to think that they have a grasp on the story, Judith Freeman throws him/her for a loop and knocks him/her off of their feet. The story begins in Las Vegas, Nevada. The reader wonders why the book begins in such as place as this. The image of this city has become a fantasy, a place in the world that was created by humans. Lucy witnesses the destruction of innocence itself when she sees the wonders of Las Vegas. Where else can someone see white tigers in a glass room or a volcano that erupts on the hour every hour? This falseness can also be portrayed in the characters as well. Lucy hopes that one day Carlos, the married doctor that saves her child's life, will sweep her away and make her his wife. It is a picture perfect ending that only happens in movies and books. Will Lucy find true love in a man that could never be faithful to her? The only link that I could find between the west and this novel is the vastness that occurs throughout. Las Vegas is surrounded by desert. The emptiness that one feels when they go into Las Vegas is seen all around. This emptiness I am talking about is the fact that nothing is real. There is no feeling in anything that is there. It is all lights and no love. Nature doesn't dare venture into this area because it wouldn't survive. If it did decide to go there, people would probably try to put it into a glass case. Nothing there is what it seems just like the west. People went to the west to try their luck at a new life just like the people that go to Vegas. They end up losing their money and moving back east. Ef everything was as it seems, all the people of the United States would move to Vegas. It is everyone's fantasy, but for most it turns out to be a nightmare instead. One of the novel's main the! mes that is shown throughout is the idea that the past is in the present and one has to deal with it. The past always seems to come back and haunt all the characters. With Lucy, it is the fact of meeting Carlos again on the Oceanus and having to deal with the pain and agony that he caused her some many years before. For Joycelle, who is a stripper in Vegas, she must come to terms with all her past relationships with men and women before she can truely be happy. Carlos has to deal with his past as well. Carlos was part of the Hitler Youth when he lived in Germany. This horrific past comes to haunt him when he becomes a passenger on the Oceanus. The boat, Oceanus, seems to be the ship that can take one to the place where the present and past meet. In the end, Carlos could not handle the past or the present. It doesn't edn like that for all the characters. How well the characters deal with their past determines how their future will turn out. Not onl

Freeman depicts a fresh view of the West

Judith Freeman challenges the idea of western novels in her book titled, A Desert of Pure Feeling. Most western novels focus on the gunfights and conflicts of the Old West. Freeman depicts a different aspect of the West. She shows the emotional and less wild side of the West. Although she challenges the idea of the Old West, I still consider her book to be a western novel. The characters in her story have the same motivation for moving West as did the settlers of earlier times. Some moved West in search of quick and easy opportunity while others moved West to escape their everyday lives in the East. As we learn in the story, Joycelle, one of the main characters, went West in an attempt to leave her past behind. She wanted to escape the situation she had gotten herself into and the West seemed to offer that escape. Lucy, another character of importance, went West in an attempt to escaper her religion. Freeman uses the idea of moving West as a minor theme in her story. A major theme that is recurring throughout the story is a reverence for the past. The characters all have something in their pasts that they would either like to re-live or repress inside them so the secrets are never revealed. Freeman's use of hidden pasts adds many twists to the plot of the novel as well as adding suspense. At one point in the story, Dr Ettinger makes a comment to Himmelfarb about Carlos. She says, "We are all very well aware of his past, I assure you." There is much irony in that statement because she really only knows what lies on the surface about Carlos' hidden past. In fact, every character has something in their pasts that they do not want the others to know about. The real truth lies not on the surface, but deep within the subconscious of each character. In my opinion, Freeman had another motive when she wrote of the past lives of her characters. Each of these secrets had something to do with sexual relationships and orientation. The issues of sex and gender were important to the plot of Freeman's novel. Sex was an important part of people's lives in the Old West, as it is still important in today's society. The whole plot revolved around past and present relationships, mainly between Carlos and Lucy and Joycelle and Lucy. We see chapters involving Carlos and then chapters involving Joycelle. This shift in time creates almost two different stories in the reader's mind. The reader is allowed to experience Lucy's past and present life. This use of chronology is just one of Freeman's literary techniques. Freeman also uses the technique of foreshadowing and symbolism often throughout her novel. Her symbolism was very powerful and made sense of confusing issues. One of the first symbols I noticed was the huge wave that strikes the boat while Carlos and Lucy are in the bar. The wave was symbolic of the past coming back to haunt each and every character in the novel. Another symbol is the idea of "crossing over", which the c

A wonderful book about facing the truth in the past.

In her entertaining, yet warmhearted novel, A Desert of Pure Feeling, Judith Freeman moves backward and forward in time, and intertwines a series of events from her narrator's life. She explores the life of Lucy Patterson, a woman who seems to be searching for truth throughout the text. Even the setting for part of the story is in Las Vegas, Nevada, a place known for its falsehood. Lucy first encounters the truth about her father, a truth that haunts her for the rest of her life. This truth makes Lucy view the idea of adultery a whole new way and it is after this incident with her father that Lucy herself begins to stray from her husband. Soon after her son's birth, Lucy feels like something had broken in her and that something was the capacity for intimacy. She feels she is protecting herself from a "loss that seemed imminent." She was right. Throughout the text, Lucy loses many relationships with people that are important to her and she goes on searching for the truth about herself and others. One reason Dr. Cabrera is so attractive to Lucy is because she knows she cannot have him. She is fully aware of the fact that he has a wife and children that he will not leave. Yet she continues to be involved with him because it allows her to get what she wants from the relationship. Lucy can get all of her physical needs from Carlos without getting tied up emotionally. The fact that the other person she falls in love with, Joycelle, is a young hooker who has just discovered that she chronically ill also supports this claim. This young mother turns out to be just as needy and troubled as Lucy herself once was. But this is yet another person that Lucy cannot fully rely on and spend the rest of her life with. She knows Joycelle is weak and does not have much life left in her. Yet by getting involved with people whom she cannot spend the rest of her life with, she does not have to have a deep, trusting relationship. All of the characters in the text seem to be dealing with their hidden secrets from the past. We find some characters, like Carlos, are unable to handle the truth, while others, like Lucy grow from revealing and facing the truth about themselves. It is a truly enlightening part of the book when everyone is being totally honest with each other and telling of their skeletons in the closet. It is at this point in the text when we realize that we all have our own secrets and issues from the past that we do not want to face. It is at this point that all of the characters are on the same level as Lucy and dealing with the same type of insecurities from the past. The events of Lucy's past broke her trust in others and she still carries the unforgettable scars she received when she was a young teenage bride and mother. She was not prepared for the feelings she had after she gave birth to her child. She felt like her son, Justin, was taken away from her the moment he was born. Then, throughout the rest of his life, Justin