By Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy’s outrageous, hilarious, aggravating, and compassionate novel is ready the Canary kinfolk, their excessive passions and eccentricities, and their mystery lives and histories. The private mystery of all is harbored within the silence of the youngest daughter, Joan, who doesn’t develop, who doesn’t communicate, yet who can play the piano like Mozart notwithstanding she’s by no means had a lesson.
Joan is a secret, and within the novel’s lovely climax her relations involves take into account that every one of them is a secret, as superb as Joan, as irreducible because the secret of lifestyles itself. In its compassionate research of ethical truths and its daring include of the fractured nature of each one in every of its characters, Mister Sandman attains the heightened caliber of a modern day parable.
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Sample text
You leave home in the dark and go home in the dark. ” I told Mrs. de Roo how I’d heard Eskimo kids spend time under artificial sunlamps to stop them getting scurvy, ’cause at the North Pole winter lasts for most of the year. I suggested Mrs. de Roo should think about getting a sunbed. Mrs. ” We passed a room where a howling baby’d just had an injection. In the next room a freckly girl Julia’s age sat in a wheelchair. One of her legs wasn’t there. She’d probably love to have my stammer if she could have her leg back, and I wondered if being happy’s about other people’s misery.
Even me? I called out, “Can you show me? ” The moon’d swum into the lake of night. We skated one orbit. The shadow-kid was still there, crouching as he skated, just like I was. We skated another orbit. An owl or something fluttered low across the lake. ” I called out. “Did you hear me? I want to know what it’s—” The ice shrucked me off my feet. For a helterskeltery moment I was in midair at an unlikely height. Bruce Lee doing a karate kick, that high. I knew it wasn’t going to be a soft landing but I hadn’t guessed how painful a slam it’d be.
Wake her brother. She needs an ambulance. No. Smash your way out. Run to Isaac Pye in the Black Swan for help. No. They’d ask why you’d been in the House in the Woods. What’d you say? You don’t even know this woman’s name. It’s too late. She’s dying, right now. I’m certain. The scrit-scrat’s uncoiling. Louder, waspier, daggerier. Her windpipe bulges as her soul squeezes out of her heart. Her worn-out eyes flip awake like a doll’s, black, glassy, shocked. From her black crack mouth, a blizzard rushes out.