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An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky: A Novel
Daniel is pursued by stories. His father, in thrall to a myth, has disappeared; his mother and sister, too; and Lydia, his lover, leaves him and the novel he cannot finish for quantum mechanics, the place where theory tells tales about the real. And then there is Pearl, the girl beneath the floorboards, whose adventures hum alongside Daniel’s own.
In this contemporary, contemplative fairy tale, the autobiographical novel takes on the cast of legend, and the uncertainty of memory leaves reality on shaky ground. Can parallel universes exist? Can a preoccupation with Moby Dick overwhelm the story unfolding before you? Where do you stand in relation to the metaphysics of your own life?
In this contemporary, contemplative fairy tale, the autobiographical novel takes on the cast of legend, and the uncertainty of memory leaves reality on shaky ground. Can parallel universes exist? Can a preoccupation with Moby Dick overwhelm the story unfolding before you? Where do you stand in relation to the metaphysics of your own life?
- GenresFictionLiterary Fiction
260 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
6 people are currently reading
113 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 16, 2013
I loved this one. The prose was immensely beautiful and truthful. I was a bit lost in parts, but I stuck with it, and the ending tied things together perfectly. I want to read more modern fiction like this.
August 23, 2021
Every decade or so I stumble across something like this. Purely literary, a masterpiece.
April 10, 2014
Dan Beachy-Quick’s An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky is an impressionistic take on the complexities of being more than one thing to more than one person and trying to understand it. And I’ll admit it, I picked it because I loved the title. It sounded so poetic and like it must have been an allusion to something I didn’t understand. Another thing I liked was Beachy-Quick’s name. It’s rhythmic and sounds like it should be the beginning of a poem or the refrain in a song or a chant at the very least.
Initially, I have to admit that I had a difficult time getting into the book. It isn’t what most would call plot-driven or even character-driven. It’s driven, sure, but not in the typical fashion that most readers are used to. At first that made me feel uncomfortable, like I didn’t know what to do with myself, but the more I started reading, the more I got into the rhythm and the motion of the book. I let it do what it was doing and when I could reach out and grab onto something that looked like a plot point or a character foible, I did, but I held on loosely. I didn’t want to be dragged down by plot or character because inevitably the story would move in a different direction.
One of the more grounding sections of the book is when we meet Daniel, a teacher who loves Melville and the novel, Moby Dick. In fact, he’s obsessed with it, much like Melville’s narrator is obsessed with finding the big white whale. He slowly starts to back away and feel less engaged with the class he is teaching. After the narrator cancels his class one day a section that echos Melville’s Moby Dick reads:
“Call me Daniel. I have a gift I keep to myself, the gift of self-abandon. It is the orphan’s lesson if he can learn it--not to feel abandoned, but to continue his abandonment past the bounds of where the loss should end, parent’s death that prefigures one’s own. Fate is everywhere speaking; it does not call you by name; it tells you to name yourself. Call me Daniel.”
This use of intertextuality only lends to Beachy-Quick’s multi-dimensional fairytale-like story, though it is unnecessary for the reader to have read Moby Dick to understand the feeling of exile and alienation that our narrator, Daniel, is feeling. Its strength lies in the call to action and reaches far beyond the bounds of the book into another one to give a layered meaning. The theme of alienation, self-afflicted or otherwise, is a strong thread that runs through the book.
Beachy-Quick also uses images to weave stories and connect the reader to what is being read. Images like water, whales, volcanoes, a fairytale book from his childhood conjure up visual cues that trigger memories from different times in the narrator’s life. The abandonment theme comes in again when the narrator remembers the time when he wanted to show Lydia (his lover) his book, but when he goes to grab it, it is gone. Vanished. “I could not say it, but it was true. Everyone vanishes.” The young narrator remembers this scene with nostalgia and abandon. I couldn’t help but feel the weight of that thought.
Strangely, this book was hard to pin down, but I liked that. I liked the way its meaning floated above and around me. This didn’t make it easy to read, but it made it interesting and different from the more linear stories I am used to. I think the best words to describe this book are layered and complex. It entangles itself with a variety of texts that use intersections of imagination, memories, and fairytales. Not a fast read, but a thought-provoking one.
Initially, I have to admit that I had a difficult time getting into the book. It isn’t what most would call plot-driven or even character-driven. It’s driven, sure, but not in the typical fashion that most readers are used to. At first that made me feel uncomfortable, like I didn’t know what to do with myself, but the more I started reading, the more I got into the rhythm and the motion of the book. I let it do what it was doing and when I could reach out and grab onto something that looked like a plot point or a character foible, I did, but I held on loosely. I didn’t want to be dragged down by plot or character because inevitably the story would move in a different direction.
One of the more grounding sections of the book is when we meet Daniel, a teacher who loves Melville and the novel, Moby Dick. In fact, he’s obsessed with it, much like Melville’s narrator is obsessed with finding the big white whale. He slowly starts to back away and feel less engaged with the class he is teaching. After the narrator cancels his class one day a section that echos Melville’s Moby Dick reads:
“Call me Daniel. I have a gift I keep to myself, the gift of self-abandon. It is the orphan’s lesson if he can learn it--not to feel abandoned, but to continue his abandonment past the bounds of where the loss should end, parent’s death that prefigures one’s own. Fate is everywhere speaking; it does not call you by name; it tells you to name yourself. Call me Daniel.”
This use of intertextuality only lends to Beachy-Quick’s multi-dimensional fairytale-like story, though it is unnecessary for the reader to have read Moby Dick to understand the feeling of exile and alienation that our narrator, Daniel, is feeling. Its strength lies in the call to action and reaches far beyond the bounds of the book into another one to give a layered meaning. The theme of alienation, self-afflicted or otherwise, is a strong thread that runs through the book.
Beachy-Quick also uses images to weave stories and connect the reader to what is being read. Images like water, whales, volcanoes, a fairytale book from his childhood conjure up visual cues that trigger memories from different times in the narrator’s life. The abandonment theme comes in again when the narrator remembers the time when he wanted to show Lydia (his lover) his book, but when he goes to grab it, it is gone. Vanished. “I could not say it, but it was true. Everyone vanishes.” The young narrator remembers this scene with nostalgia and abandon. I couldn’t help but feel the weight of that thought.
Strangely, this book was hard to pin down, but I liked that. I liked the way its meaning floated above and around me. This didn’t make it easy to read, but it made it interesting and different from the more linear stories I am used to. I think the best words to describe this book are layered and complex. It entangles itself with a variety of texts that use intersections of imagination, memories, and fairytales. Not a fast read, but a thought-provoking one.
July 25, 2014
Dan Beachy-Quick, best known as a poet, finds his prose-legs in this elaborately plotted novel of love, adoption, solitude, friendship, fate, and eros set on the campus of a small rural college. Those who have read BQ before will be alert to his mixing of reality and fiction, and close readers will discover traces of Keats, Hopkins, Melville, Proust and others. As in BQ's poems, the structure of this novel is like that of an expensive watch: the gears of juxtaposed sentences are precisely cut, the plot turns inside the jeweled bearings of BQ's rhythmically luscious stanzas. Every reference circles around to complete a pattern. And each character is invested in another to a degree that feels essentially spiritual.
The coincidence level is high. And the principal action, despite that dramatic events take place, might best be described as a meditative urgency. But BQ shows himself again to be one of our deftest charters of intimate geographies.
The coincidence level is high. And the principal action, despite that dramatic events take place, might best be described as a meditative urgency. But BQ shows himself again to be one of our deftest charters of intimate geographies.
February 25, 2014
I have forgotten more books than I remember (obviously).
But some books twang some string inside you.
This book took me longer than it should have to get through.
There were times where I felt impatient, or thought of the main character: "coward. literary thief. narcissist"
Books can teach us about ourselves, if they have any kind of power.
By reflecting our judgements, our identification, our forgivenesses.
This book weaves disparate stories, tales, fictions, and character truths throughout in a weaving coda, and if you get to the end, perhaps something will resonate in you as well as a drop in a pool reflecting the book back at itself. Perhaps the truth of anything isn't as important as the resonance of what you leave behind for yourself to find.
Perhaps.
But some books twang some string inside you.
This book took me longer than it should have to get through.
There were times where I felt impatient, or thought of the main character: "coward. literary thief. narcissist"
Books can teach us about ourselves, if they have any kind of power.
By reflecting our judgements, our identification, our forgivenesses.
This book weaves disparate stories, tales, fictions, and character truths throughout in a weaving coda, and if you get to the end, perhaps something will resonate in you as well as a drop in a pool reflecting the book back at itself. Perhaps the truth of anything isn't as important as the resonance of what you leave behind for yourself to find.
Perhaps.
June 19, 2014
I love Dan's poetry and was curious about his first novel. This is a beautiful book. The imagery astounds. The layers make it worth reading and coming back to. I can't help but see parts of the work as explorations of what it means to teach; what it means to love; and what it means to search. Each question folds in on the others. The connections to Craig Arnold's disappearance, to Ahab's hunt, to myth and to our internal and external lives make this a book work reading and re-reading.
January 10, 2014
A difficult book to read but somehow it grabs you and pulls you in. Deeply philosophical and
introspective. I believe it will stay with me for quite some time.
introspective. I believe it will stay with me for quite some time.
December 15, 2024
I see I've crossed the equator again. A pearl is made of consecutive layers of nacre, and if one had the patience, and the right tool, one could remove layer after layer— this process might take years—remove the beautiful sheen, ignore the nacre, and find in the very center that irritant in the mouth that caused the unconscious reflex to begin, the helpless instinct that makes of small pain subtle beauty. I would find—
A single grain of sand.
A Colorado poet and writer, and the first fiction I have read of his, and it's different, lovely, meditative. The memory is igneous passage is gorgeous. Why this kind of book doesn't win the big awards, I will never understand, there is so much boring mediocrity that does. One of the highlights of the year!
The story has lost its order, the story I am writing, this story of my life. Emerson thought the mind's nature was volcanic; my father was the first person to tell me this. A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen. It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference. It looks the same, but we are imagining it.
Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. White hills of pages, there you are on the flat desk. And only when I sit down do I notice a black beetle upside down, rowing his legs against the air. Then I knew the poet fell into the volcano's crater, despite the investigator's assurance. There is nowhere else to fall.
It is music that taught me how to think about the universe. It is a thinking back to the moment of the Big Bang, that first instant in which the universe exploded from a singularity to an infinitely expanding everything. There are some theorists, and I guess now I am one of them, who suspect that multiple other universes began at the same time, each infinite in scope just like ours, but perhaps formed so differently as to have entirely other natural laws. These universes are, some say, the multiverse; they aren't wholly separate from one another. There are realms, theoretically, where one universe touches and merges into the other, where the 'laws' collide, a genuine chaos that causes the birth of another universe. It's that collision I'm considering."
I wanted to write a different world; I write the small, cunning world I am. It is a limit I have resigned myself to, my life. The page is a curious mirror one polishes with oneself to see oneself clearer, but the polishing, as it brings the surface to a sheen, also warps it, alters the image into beauty that does not exist, or cruelty that does not exist, except latent, a virus or a seed dormant in the personality, awaiting the right condition to spring into life, to viruslike infect the cell, to weed-like run rampant through the field, but the only element of life is life, this life I lead, in which the pages I write become the fallow field waiting to be turned over, where the sentences are the plough's edge turning up the sod into sillion's dark shine.
I'm trying to think about another world, another universe. I do the math and the math points at the possibility. But when I describe it to myself, when I write about it in my notes, I reconfigure only what I already know, have seen already, or felt. There's only this world to imagine another. It is a serious problem for me. The world becomes what I imagine of a world.
I looked down at the blank page. The blank page is a form of light, lit by the eye as it tries to see itself see. The blank page is the eye's light.
A single grain of sand.
A Colorado poet and writer, and the first fiction I have read of his, and it's different, lovely, meditative. The memory is igneous passage is gorgeous. Why this kind of book doesn't win the big awards, I will never understand, there is so much boring mediocrity that does. One of the highlights of the year!
The story has lost its order, the story I am writing, this story of my life. Emerson thought the mind's nature was volcanic; my father was the first person to tell me this. A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen. It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference. It looks the same, but we are imagining it.
Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. White hills of pages, there you are on the flat desk. And only when I sit down do I notice a black beetle upside down, rowing his legs against the air. Then I knew the poet fell into the volcano's crater, despite the investigator's assurance. There is nowhere else to fall.
It is music that taught me how to think about the universe. It is a thinking back to the moment of the Big Bang, that first instant in which the universe exploded from a singularity to an infinitely expanding everything. There are some theorists, and I guess now I am one of them, who suspect that multiple other universes began at the same time, each infinite in scope just like ours, but perhaps formed so differently as to have entirely other natural laws. These universes are, some say, the multiverse; they aren't wholly separate from one another. There are realms, theoretically, where one universe touches and merges into the other, where the 'laws' collide, a genuine chaos that causes the birth of another universe. It's that collision I'm considering."
I wanted to write a different world; I write the small, cunning world I am. It is a limit I have resigned myself to, my life. The page is a curious mirror one polishes with oneself to see oneself clearer, but the polishing, as it brings the surface to a sheen, also warps it, alters the image into beauty that does not exist, or cruelty that does not exist, except latent, a virus or a seed dormant in the personality, awaiting the right condition to spring into life, to viruslike infect the cell, to weed-like run rampant through the field, but the only element of life is life, this life I lead, in which the pages I write become the fallow field waiting to be turned over, where the sentences are the plough's edge turning up the sod into sillion's dark shine.
I'm trying to think about another world, another universe. I do the math and the math points at the possibility. But when I describe it to myself, when I write about it in my notes, I reconfigure only what I already know, have seen already, or felt. There's only this world to imagine another. It is a serious problem for me. The world becomes what I imagine of a world.
I looked down at the blank page. The blank page is a form of light, lit by the eye as it tries to see itself see. The blank page is the eye's light.
February 12, 2020
A dreamlike read.. fortuitous to be reading it while I slog through Moby Dick which is one of the stories that Beach-Quick draws on.
August 10, 2024
Beautiful stuff, this is divided into 4 "Books" and in the fourth there is real gold, but the whole thing is great.
January 29, 2014
I had a lot of thoughts about this one. I found the unusual writing/narrative style pretty self-conscious and unwieldy, yet there were many aspects of the story that drew me in and kept me reading. It reminded me of early Terry Gilliam films in its fantastical, mythical elements, and I really enjoyed that. Mostly though I was frustrated and bored with the main character's exploration of self, fatherhood/family, agency, and reality. I think it celebrates Daniel for abandoning his responsibilities (to Lydia, to his students) because he can't escape "inevitably" following in his father's footsteps. I hate the trope (both in real life and in literature) that one's fate or narrative is inescapable--it is boring and lazy.
December 5, 2013
This is an extremely complex book. Metaphysical. Poetic. I liked it more as I moved further into the story and think I would get even more from it upon a second reading. It is the kind of book that expects much from a reader and I found my mind wandering.
June 21, 2020
I abandoned this one. The description sounded interesting, and I liked the writing style fairly well.
But the story still hadn't 'started' at 25% of the way through, and I'd run out of library renewals. Too many other, better books drew me away instead.
But the story still hadn't 'started' at 25% of the way through, and I'd run out of library renewals. Too many other, better books drew me away instead.
September 19, 2013
Ugh. The story is ok and the format (switching between prose and poetry) is interesting enough, but it's just SO PRETENTIOUS!! I got bored and dropped it after about 100 pages.
July 7, 2015
Beautifully written. Wanted to like it better than I did. Felt romantic but untrue? Ultimately guy narrator annoys me at a fundamental level: thinks self profound, makes own bed.
July 1, 2014
Some magical passages but too wrapped up in the mythology of a character we hardly get the chance to connect to/with.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews