DREAMING OF DEAD PEOPLE

A reissued novel from a wildly original writer explodes the form with a sensual exposé of midlife.

Lavinia is 36, restless and judgmental in London or Venice but truly herself in woods and fields with the animals she loves. She is somewhat feral, in fact, and that is one of the charms of this spellbinding novel, first published in 1979. While modern life has changed radically since then, perhaps especially for women, Belben is still walloping readers with visceral vignettes. The novel arranges facets of Lavinia’s life and mind through six thematic sections: on sex and celibacy, Robin Hood (yes, from the 14th century), childhood, travel, loneliness (“In every patch a papa, a mama, and their heart-shaped-faced children, a family circle, complete, into which I intrude….I am a moth”), and the end of life for various creatures, including a beloved dog. Belben sketches scenes with a calligraphy brush and quick washes of color. Her renegade heroine recalls a solo traveler from Jean Rhys or Renata Adler, guzzling the world in elegant decrepitude. An imaginary daughter named Jessie sometimes accompanies her. Her parents haunt her, too, but the lost people she dwells on include versions of herself. Every creature and object is charged and embodied: “The dwellings had their eyelids down.” She sees herself in everything and everyone, living in layers of history and literature. Accordingly, Belben’s language is exciting, mined from biblical and Shakespearean cadences: “I am aware of isolated parts of my body which have no feeling; they feel and feel not; such as the hair on my skin.” She is unafraid of gore and puns. As singular as Belben is, she shares a juicy terrain with lusty intellects (Harold Brodkey, Jeannette Winterson); tender, rooted poets (D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas); rhapsodic magpies (Gertrude Stein, James Joyce); fantastical artists (Hieronymus Bosch); and playfully morbid filmmakers (Yorgos Lanthimos, Daina Oniunas-Pusić). Belben collages a primal, dreamlike landscape that is a thrilling privilege to visit. This is social history, too, a takedown of the “old maid” as cautionary tale. It is remarkable how much younger 36 seems now than in Belben’s telling, and what Lavinia calls “the glow of celibacy” is all the rage. Readers who delight in women’s radical fantasies will also be rewarded by the wicked visions from a time when finding erotic freedom with a self-celebrated female body was revolutionary.

The novel fires on all senses with an earthy, frank heroine who’s riveting to know and impossible to forget.