Seaview

Начало книги

TO ENTER A TOBY OLSON FICTION IS TO ENTER AN UN — guarded borderland. Sometimes one finds oneself at an actual border — the Mexican-American one, for example, in such books as The Woman Who Escaped from Shame or The Blond Box—but even there, the encounter is felt to be emblematic of stranger, more enigmatic borders: that between the natural and the uncanny, for example, between notions of gender and between cultures, between the real and the surreal or the real and our perception of the real, between the mundane and the extraordinary, the probable and the improbable, between dreams and the waking life. In the opening “ Tea Dream” chapter of Seaview, the golfer Allen, dreaming of a great white horse on a golf course galloping down at him from green to tee, is awakened by his mortally ill wife, Melinda, blowing the steam off a cup of jasmine tea in his face, so gently bringing him to consciousness that the border between dream and waking life is dissolved: “And the dream and what he might have chosen to call reality had come together like a kind of smoke net to lift him up.” Allen later uses this border-less emergence from sleep to try to describe, while meditating upon Melinda’s looming death (which seems almost beyond the real, yet utterly of it), another kind of awakening, this time from everyday practical thought into an augmented “clarity that rendered most of the rest dreamlike.” Something like an epiphany.

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