The dream mistress

by Jenny Diski

Jenny Diski's memoir, Skating to Antarctica , offered a painful portrait of a childhood beset by parental abuse and abandonment. The Dream Mistress covers similar territory, but in this case, fiction in some ways proves more disturbing than real life. Mimi is a narcoleptic dressmaker, Bella a mentally unstable street person. Their lives intersect briefly when Mimi finds an unconscious Bella in a back alley and calls an ambulance. Though the two won't meet again, it soon becomes apparent as the novel switches back and forth between them that they are more closely connected than either knows. Diski juxtaposes the understated terror of Bella's slow disintegration with the almost dreamlike detachment of Mimi's emotionally vacant life. Though it's clear from the start just how these two women are connected, the author doesn't overplay it, choosing, instead, subtle parallels in their lives--Bella entering the church as a nun with faith but without belief eerily resonates with Mimi's illicit affair that is at once passionate yet loveless. There's a great deal of graphic sex that is more disturbing than erotic, and Diski doesn't pull her punches when it comes to describing madness, homelessness, or the often brutal relations between men and women. The Dream Mistress is an undeniably intelligent novel, if a chilly one; a book that is easier to admire than to love. --Alix Wilber

Genres: British Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jenny Diski was a British writer. Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction articles, reviews and books. She was awarded the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

None of this hung together in any way, shape or form. It completely lacked sense. What a waste of a tree.

[Rita · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nou, dit was het niet. Of ik begreep het geloof ik allemaal niet zo. Een schrijver kan het ook te ingewikkeld maken.

[John Hills · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this book were absolutely fantastic, mostly the sections relating to the Bella who became an agnostic nun. I could have done with more of that and less of Mimi and Jack, less of the final section with thr other Bella and the guy who was an awful character. The prose is undeniably wonderful and a joy to read, but the final 50 pages or so really let it down

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Jenny Diski's work, but equally I am incredibly frustrated by her books. Her lyrical prose - the word 'pellucid' comes to mind - and her stark, stunning imagery are compellingly unique. The last few pages of 'The Dream Mistress' are classic Diski - strange, melancoly, romantic, sublimely beautiful, unlike anything I've ever read before. But the story proceeding it is impenetrable and Diski offers no clues to the reader as to how to put the events and characters in the novel together. Perhaps that's the point: there is no meaning in life, just a series of ebbs and flows with no underlying direction or pattern. That may well be Diski's message, but just a little signposting, a little help for her (at times) bewildered reader would have made this a much more rewarding experience.

[Julie (73) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish this, depressing writing and gave up trying to understand what was going on.