Flight from Reality

...It's as though you were to go into a room and everything you touched turned into dust, puff, it isn't there, it's ashes...

...And when life does not accord with this seemingly innocent fiction, her reaction is to strike out like a hurt child, a paranoiac adult: "One's whole life, everything turns out to be lies...

...Albany is a woman who destroyed her husband's and her children's lives in order to preserve her own myth of reality—in a vainglorious attempt to force her outworn concepts of life to become real...

...In the present, there is the flight of Mrs...

...In fact, much can be said for a theory that the wasteland of Eliot, the nighttown of Joyce, the castle of Kafka began with the dustheap of Dickens...

...You can't take it in, at first, you never even imagined the possibility of your life being either true or false, you think life just is, the way a table is or a chair is, or a tree or a stone or a house is...

...That is art...

...The irony of the novel—what to me makes it a truly memorable work —is that Mrs...

...Reviewed by John Franklin Bardin Author, "Christmas Comes But Once Year," "The Burning Glass" This is a novel that is particularly rich in symbolism, and yet it has the human interest, the narrative pace, the humor and melodrama of the later Dickens...

...She has been reduced to the position of a recluse, guarded by a faithful servant and three wolf-like clogs, as the novel begins...

...Mrs...

...In the past, there are Mrs...

...Albany's ideals, which destroy her family as surely as the vengeance and jealousy of Medea, are the simple and homiletic desires of Everywoman: "to be the most beautiful bride in town" to have a lovely home and nice friends to be loved by her husband and family to raise good children who tell the truth in the end, simply to be at her husband's deathbed...

...Your world will not look the same for quite some time after reading Carnival by the Sea, if it ever does again...

...Albany, a shabby-genteel recluse who lives with her dustheap of furniture—the ruins of her marriage—in a remodeled restaurant, a house in the form of a coffee pot...

...The time is the off-season, when the amusement park is closed down and the town's inhabitants driven in upon themselves...

...She is an illusion that insists upon crying her reality—but she is no different from the typical woman of our time who shares her delusive faith in the specificity of reality...

...Albany's ramblings, the musings of an old woman remembering her days as wife and mother, her attempts to shape her family into an ideal mold, the catastrophe of Dissy's illness (brought on by her mother's neglect, which left the child's mind impaired), the flight of her husband and his death, her own inability to accept any reality that conflicts with her romantic ambition...

...She is unable to imagine an uncommon world, and, at last, her daughter is discovered in the fun house of an amusement park, amid a thousand mirrors that make any human figure dwindle to a pygmy...

...And then suddenly it isn't...

...This is an example of the witty ambiguity of the author's symbols: The coffee-pot house reminds the reader at once of the "old woman who lived in a shoe/ She had so many children she didn't know what to do" and of Eliot's Prufrock, who said, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...

...Miss de Lima has written another work of great originality, and one with a tremendous emotional impact...

...Of course, when Mrs...

...The narrative proceeds on two levels...

...If there is a young writer publishing today whom I believe certain to be read ten years from now, she is Sigrid de Lima...

...Her tragedy is the breakdown of common sense...

...Miss de Lima's characterization is especially Dickensian: the Dickens of Our Mutual Friend, the Victorian who imagined a hill composed of dust, who created a man who earned his livelihood robbing the corpses of the Thames's victims—not the impassioned young sentimentalist of Pickwick or Copperfield...

...Albany says "life just is," she is asserting her faith in common sense...

...One of these inhabitants is a Mrs...

...Albany's pseudonymous son, Ed Miller, to forget an unfortunate marriage, to become a man by relating to his landlady...

...The setting of Carnival by the Sea is a small resort town in California of that name...

...Albany's daughter, Dissy, from the nearby mental hospital where she has been incarcerated by her mother—the search of this Ophelia for her mother, for the acceptance and love she has never had —and the attempt of Mrs...

...One's whole life turns out not to have been at all, it's only a picture that you had in your mind's eye and it was false, an untrue picture of something that never even existed...