I recently finished reading “Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams” by Catherynne M. Valente. I have wavered back and forth for a few years about my interest in reading it. I finally took the plunge.
I am going to clip parts of both descriptions listed on Amazon.Com for this book. (I am really getting anal about this, but I don’t have faith in myself coming up with good descriptions.) These descriptions I am using are from Publishers Weekly and Regina Schroeder’s review at Booklist:
…an allegorical fantasy whose dreamlike threads reach into Shinto and Western myth, mathematics and physics…
Now an old woman, Ayako as a child escaped the destruction of her village and found solitary refuge on a nearby mountain. Her only contact with humanity comes, years later, when the village is reinhabited.
Her only visitors are village boys, who bring gifts of tea and think she is a spirit. She doesn’t often try to talk to them, for spirits aren’t supposed to ask questions. She wanders through dreams and myths, receiving lessons from the mountain and the river, climbing through successive levels of a pagoda as the seasons change, aging through the seasons of many years, and learning from all she observes.
The last sentence of the Publishers Weekly review states:
Those who admire literary craft and rich language will most appreciate this sublime tale.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. The plot is very minimal. There is little story to move things forward. Many of the scenes are, as described previously, dreamlike threads. It is rather surreal. At times I could find clues to what these scenes were trying to say, and other times I was totally lost. However, the prose is beautiful. I know someone that writes reviews, I often read his blog, and they really worship writing such as this. I can see this being a huge hit to those type of people. Most would call them pretentious.
Catherynne M. Valente
The poetry of the writing made it a wonder to read. It is amazing how someone can try to say something with such language. But part of me was hoping for something a little less in the writing style, and a little more story. Being that most of the story surrounds a solitary person, it turned more into a character study. Was Ayako insane? Was she a goddess and saw things from grander views then we can imagine? Was she a companion to the things of nature that she befriended, and that being her sole purpose? Did her discovery lead her to any of these levels? Or where the levels of the pagoda her ascension, and her discovery the gift? The writing I am sure hid many of the answers, and I have some ideas, but am not sure.
This book is probably not accessible to many. There isn’t a thick storyline. There aren’t engaging characters. There is no definitive answer at the end of the book. And many probably can’t see through the rich prose (me included). Familiarity with Shinto and Western myth may help as well. But being a shorter book (probably best classified as a novella), it was still a real treat to read the incredible language that Valente speaks. It is obviously not one that I speak very well, but would love to.
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