Phosphor in Dreamland

Winner of the Critic's Choice Award of 1995Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet's dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island's 17th-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island's exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza.
The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet's previous novel (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), was described by one reviewer as "Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll." Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.

"[Ducornet] writes like a stunned time-traveler, testifying in breathless fragments to exotic ages that have gone or never were. . . . It's startling and refreshing to encounter a writer whose work insists so relentlessly upon the magic of making tales." (Robert Chatain, Chicago Tribune 12-5-95)

"Ducornet's novel is both incoherent and astonishing, a complex fantasia redolent of Swift and Borges, but stranger than both." (The London Times 2-25-96)

"Ducornet has created a book that is both touching and slyly funny." (Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year 11-6-95)

"Phosphor in Dreamland is one of the finest persuasions to date for the life of the erotic, the sensual. . . . Rikki Ducornet is a writer whose work deserves our joyous attention." (Los Angeles Times 12-17-95)

"Phosphor in Dreamland is a book unlike any you have read before." (James Sallis, New York Times Book Review 10-29-95)

"Ducornet's fabulous narrative contrivances offer the serious reader both an unusual challenge and a dreamy scape from the constrictions of realism. She's something of a mythical beast herself: a surrealist with a sense of humor, and also a sense of history." (Kirkus 9-1-95)

Publishers Weekly

Although Ducornet's Tetralogy of Elements ended in 1993 with the NBCC nominee The Jade Cabinet, her wondrous new novel might represent the most unpredictable property of all: light. In letters to a friend, the lonely narrator describes the fantastical history of his native Birdland. In the mid-17th century, a clubfooted, cross-eyed baby was abandoned on the doorstep of the island's unsavory and unique prelate, Fogginus. Nicknamed Phosphor for his fancied luminosity, the child spends much of his youth locked away in his guardian's sea trunk, where he re-discovers the camera obscura, gradually embellishing its images with a third dimension and permanence. Together with Fogginus and his patron, Fango Fantasma, a particularly noxious local grandee, Phosphor sets out to document Birdland both in images (through which Fantasma believes he will possess the island) and in an epic poem about his homeland. Phosphor in Dreamland is filled with wry references to Swift (a scholarly double biography titled A Swift and Phosphorous Eye is alluded to), and like that satirist's, Ducornet's humor is sly and sharp. Unlike Swift, though, she also conveys a tender melancholy: for the last of the aboriginal lplps, a giant bird tended by an arboreal barber, and for Birdland's past, which is preserved only by Phosphor's invention. ``Thanks to this wonderful machine, a city that exists no more, a world still even to sublimity, is contained as if by magic on flat pieces of glass.'' (Oct.)