Mastering the Dream

By Kelly Lydick

Poetry. "Only when The entire world looks different and I will never be able to see the old world again can the speaker of MASTERING THE DREAM maneuver through epistle, poetry, Jewish thought,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0977382311
• ISBN13: 9780977382316
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Second Story Books
• Length: 113 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.

Customer Reviews

New Narrative Advance

I don't know Kelly Lydick myself but after reading "Mastering the Dream," published by the always estimable Second Story Press, I have no hesitation in saying that the future of New Narrative is in good hands. Her novel is a poetically experimental and ultra symbolic account of nearly a decade in a young woman's life, told in a variety of forms, and part of the fun is seeing how much mileage Lydick is going to get out of these disparate forms bumping into one another, like brassbound trunks in the hold of a ship at sea. Some passages are letters, letters that begin "Dear Marie" (the name, we take it, of the heroine) but which are also signed by "Marie," as though the Marie of the future or present is writing to the Marie of the past. "Take Three Tenses," in the words of the late UK novelist Rumer Godden, and Lydick takes that advice to heart, splitting up her narrative betwen past, present and future. In this regard, Lydick's masterstroke is to match up these tenses with three characters from the Hebrew alphabet--the very first three letters, in her research, the three letters which originally formed the very boundaries of human consciousness. They float across the lower border of her evocative front cover, Aleph. Mem. Shin. Together they triangulate nearly all the experience of young Marie, while acting as polar stars to a wealth of history, science, religion and culture that accrue to them like stardust. Marie is both aware, and unaware, of the vast patterns of culture she swims in. Often she seems entirely unaware and writes like someone telling what they did today for their Facebook entry. "They like me here, too," she tells us about a clerical job. "I'm fast. Faster than others. I'm such a good worker. Every boss I've ever had said I was a keeper." Elsewhere the narrative proceeds in careful lists of opposites: "modest" vs. "conceited" and the like. Up in the night sky Marie makes out the twin stars, Castor and Pollux. It's a book of twinship, mirroring, doubling, and refraction. As Marie, and the Hebrew characters which have shaped her and which now guide her, writes her way towards the present day, we grow fond of her at the same time as we worry for her. Through her progress we participate in Lydick's grand experiment: we get to experience, and then to escape, the trap of dualism.