Wild Nights

by Emma Tennant

From the rear jacket An Incandescent fictional memoir, a fiery angel of a novel.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Novels

134 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 1980

About the author

Since the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.

Reviews

[Seren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently I like her original fiction more than Austen/Bronte tie-ins. I did really enjoy it but found found it difficult to re-engage after a break. Best read in one sitting. I'm glad I read the blurb, so knew it flits between reality and the narrator's imagination.

[V · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this magic realism novel, everything is described in the same flat affect, which makes it impossible to discern what is actually happening from the overly poetical language. A woman may have been burned alive by a mob, but it was described in the same brisk detachment as the description of a living room, so who knows? It certainly didn't seem to have much of an emotional effect on the narrator, the woman's niece.

At one point, two-thirds of the way through the book, the narrator talks about her relatives mocking the village half-wit. This made me wonder if her uncle who makes a cocoon for himself out of hot wax, and her aunt who carries on an incestuous relationship with her dead brother were supposed to be sane all this time.

This book is kind of like reading a transcript of a stranger's dream--it's weird, but there isn't a lot to care about.

We also have a lot of sentences that are pure word salad, for example:

"A comic book air filled the sitting-room, and the sofas and chairs, respectfully clothed in the tentacular flowers of Utopian socialism, were subjected to a crude overlay."

The author uses so much dense poetic language, that her descriptions do have some occasional hits, like "the music sounded as if the needle were going the wrong way on the track," but its not enough to make up for the nonexistent story and blank characters.

If someone is interested in this kind of domestic magical realism, I would recommend Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson or Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum instead.

[Vasha7 · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my journal entry. It was a confusing but fascinating reading experience.