| | | |
Based loosely on the relationship between Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, My Mother: Demonology is the powerful story of a woman's struggle with the contradictory impulses for love and solitude.
At the dawn of her adult life, Laure becomes involved in a passionate and all-consuming love affair with her companion, B. But this ultimately leaves her dissatisfied, as she acknowledges her need to establish for herself an identity independent of her relationship with him.
Yearning to discover who she is, to better understand herself, Laure embarks on a journey of self-discovery--a search that demands solitude and puts her at odds with the passion she feels for her lover, an odyssey that takes her into the territory of her past, into memories and fantasies of childhood, into wildness and witchcraft, into a world where the power of dreams, of perception, can transcend the legacies of the past and confront the dilemmas of the present.
Unique among American novelists as the writer who consistently pushes at the frontiers of modern fiction, Kathy Acker makes advances into new and unexpected territory in each new work. With a poet's attention to the power of language and a keen sense of the dislocation that can occur when the narrative encompasses violence and pornography, as well as the traumas of childhood memory, Acker here takes another major step toward establishing her vision of a new literary aesthetic. By turns ferocious, subtle, searing, and passionate, My Mother: Demonology is a triumphant play of the imagination and a compelling testimony to the power of words to unsettle and to reveal hidden meaning.
| |
|
