Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 1994, ISBN: 1994, Издательство: Tor, Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Memory and Dream: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Memory and Dream»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Dreams have magic in them. A few of us have the power to make that magic real. A masterwork by one of fantasy’s most gifted storytellers: a magnificent tale of love, courage, and the power of imagination to transform our lives.
This is the novel Charles de Lint’s many devoted readers have been waiting for, the compelling odyssey of a young woman whose visionary art frees ancient spirits into the modern world.
Isabelle Copley’s visionary art frees ancient spirits. As the young student of the cruel, brilliant artist Vincent Rushkin, she discovered she could paint images so vividly real they brought her wildest fantasies to life. But when the forces she unleashed brought tragedy to those she loved, she turned her back on her talent—and on her dreams.
Now, twenty years later, Isabelle must come to terms with the shattering memories she has long denied, and unlock the slumbering power of her brush. And, in a dark reckoning with her old master, she must find the courage to live out her dreams and bring the magic back to life.
Charles de Lint’s skillful blending of contemporary urban characters and settings with traditional folk magic has made him one of the most popular fantasy authors of his generation.
Memory and Dream is the most ambitious work of de Lint’s extraordinary career, an exciting tale of epic scope that explores the power our dreams have to transform the world-or make it a waking nightmare.
It is the story of Isabelle Copley, a young artist who once lived in the bohemian quarter of the northern city of Newford. As a student of Vincent Rushkin, a cruel but gifted painter, she discovered an awesome power—to craft images so real that they came to life. With her paintbrush she called into being the wild spirits of the wood, made her dreams come true with canvas and paint. But when the forces she unleashed brought unexpected tragedy to those she loved, she ran away from Newford, turning her back on her talent-and on her dreams.
Now, twenty years later, the power of Newford has reached out to draw her back. To fulfill a promise to a long-dead friend, Isabelle must come to terms with the shattering memories she has long denied, and unlock the slumbering power of her brush. She must accept her true feelings for her newfound lover John Sweetgrass, a handsome young Native American who is the image of her most intense imaginings. And, in a dark reckoning with her old master, she must find the courage to live out her dreams, and bring the magic back to life.
Charles de Lint - Novelist, poet, artist, and musician, Charles de Lint is one of the most influential fantasy writers of his generation. With such warmly received works as Spiritwalk, Moonheart, Into the Green, and Dreams Underfoot(also set in the town of Newford), he has earned high praise from readers and critics alike, Booklist has called him “one of the most original fantasy writers currently working.” And The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction writes: “De Lint shows us that, far from being escapism, contemporary fantasy can be the deep, mythic literature of our time.” De Lint and his wife MaryAnn Harris, an artist, live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where they are both Celtic musicians in the band Jump At the Sun. “For more than a decade, Charles de Lint has enjoyed a reputation as one of the world’s leading fantasists.”— “A superb storyteller. De Lint has a flair for tales that blur the lines between the mundane world and magical reality, and nowhere is this more evident than in his fictional city of Newford.”— “De Lint can feel the beauty of the ancient lore he is evoking. He can well imagine what it would be like to conjure the Other World among ancient standing stones. His characters have a certain fallibility that makes them multidimensional and human, and his settings are gritty. This is no Disneylike Never-Never Land. Life and death in de Lint’s world are more than a matter of a few words or a magic crystal.” – “There is no better writer now than Charles de Lint at bringing out the magic in contemporary life ... The best of the post-Stephen King contemporary fantasists, the one with the clearest vision of the possibilities of magic in a modern setting.” — “In the fictional city of Newford, replete with the brutal realities of modern urban life, de Lint’s characters encounter magic in strange and unexpected places ... In de Lint’s capable hands, modern fantasy becomes something other than escapism. It becomes folk song, the stuff of urban myth.” —

Memory and Dream — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Memory and Dream», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Kathy was the first to call her Izzy, making a play on Isabelle with her ma belle Izzy, but she herself was the one who took to the name and wore it into her new life. Izzy wasn’t simply a role she played, a coat she put on to protect her from inclement weather that was easily discarded once more. All those years in Newford she was Izzy. Being Izzy let her fit in with the art crowd at university, her Waterhouse Street cohorts, the bohemian scene in Lower Crowsea. Being Izzy had opened all the doors that shy Isabelle wouldn’t even have paused at before. She only signed Isabelle’s name to her paintings because of Rushkin, because it had been easier to do so than argue with him about what he perceived as the inappropriateness of going by a nickname in the world of fine art.

But Izzy hadn’t been all strength and chutzpah. Names were potent, but changing your name couldn’t entirely discard the baggage you had to carry along from the past to where you were now. Izzy still had her insecurities. Izzy was still capable of being browbeaten by the Rushkins of the world, abandoned by the Johns, mugged by a gang of street punks who didn’t know what her name was and certainly didn’t care. Izzy still preferred to avoid confrontations and to hide her pains deep in the shadowy recesses of her mind, where they wouldn’t be easily stumbled upon.

Names were potent, Izzy understood, but in the end they were still only labels, easy tags that could never hope to entirely encompass the complex individuals they were supposed to describe. All they could ever do was reflect some aspect of the face you wanted to turn to the world, not define it. But they helped—in the same way that labels made it easier to choose between one thing and another. Coffee or tea? Smoking or nonsmoking section? Expressionism or Impressionism?

Returning to the island, she realized that Izzy had been left behind by the roadside, somewhere in between Newford and the turnoff to the island, and she was ready to embrace Isabelle once more. Was ready to define herself as Isabelle—at least insofar as she needed a label for herself. The differences between the younger Isabelle and who she was now were few. She was twenty-four now, not seventeen.

She was a moderately successful artist. Her father was dead. She was on the island by choice, not because she had to be.

She spent her first few weeks on the island feeling very much at loose ends. Organizing her living space swallowed some time. She set up a studio in the back bedroom and made a storage space for her numena paintings in the attic. It took her a little while to get used to sleeping in her parents’ bedroom, but once she’d repainted and moved her own furniture in, it seemed more her own. Her old bedroom she converted into the guest room—although privately she already thought of it as Kathy’s room.

Her mother had auctioned off all the farm animals and equipment, including the barge that had been used to transport livestock and crops to the mainland, but left her the old rowboat. A hired boat from one of the marinas down the coast had been all she’d needed to transport her belongings to the island, and the rowboat was enough to get her back and forth from the mainland, where she parked the used VW that she’d bought from Alan.

She found she missed the sound of the city at first—the traffic, the sirens, the constant hubbub of noise that she’d entirely tuned out after a while. But the quiet nights and open skies of the country had been bred into her at an early age and she was soon seduced by them all over again. Initially, it had been hard to work because it was so quiet; within three weeks the difficulty in getting started was because she tended to have her morning coffee out on the porch and then found herself puttering in the garden or going for a long ramble out along the shore or in the forest and the next thing she’d know, the whole morning and half the afternoon was gone.

Still, she was painting, at first more in the evenings than during the day, and was surprised to realize that, by the fall, she’d have enough pieces to hang for a new show without having to give up working on her new series of numena.

The numena. She could feel their presence on the island, but they still re-fused contact with her. All of them—even Rosalind and Cosette. Even Annie Nin, who’d been the one that had really convinced her that she should sell the numena paintings in her show. But if they kept their distance from her, they still went into her studio. Many times she came into it to find that things had been rifled through, and small items were missing. Some pencils and paper, a paint-brush, a tube of paint. Cosette, she’d think, and then feel sad all over again.

But she even grew used to that and where at first she’d looked forward to her trips into the city, by the time June was rolling up on July, it was all she could do to get into her car and make the drive in. She missed Kathy, though, and it was because of her that she nude sure that she went to town at least once every couple of weeks.

XXIV

Newford, September 1979

Isabelle was completely disoriented the first time she visited Kathy in her new apartment on Gracie Street. All the familiar furnishings were there, but they were all in the wrong place. The old floor lamp with its marble stand that they’d picked up at a flea market still provided illumination for Kathy’s favorite reading chair, but both of them stood in an unfamiliar corner by a bay window they’d never had on Waterhouse Street, overlooking a view that belonged to a stranger. Kathy’s collection of antique photos was in the hall, along with some of Isabelle’s own sketches that Kathy’d had framed, but they were all in a different order. Isabelle knew the bookcases, the carpets, the sofa, the drapes, the various knick-knacks, but their new configurations kept surprising her, no matter how often she came to visit.

She’d tried to explain it to Kathy once, but her friend had only laughed. “You’re far too set in your ways,” she told Isabelle. “In fact, I almost had a heart attack myself the first time you came back from the island wearing that red-checked flannel shirt of yours. I don’t think I’d ever seen you wear anything but black before that.”

By the time the summer ended, Isabelle was only coming into town when she had to.

“I guess the real news is that I’ve fmally finished my second collection,” Kathy said when Isabelle dropped by the Gracie Street apartment on her latest trip into town. “Alan’s going to publish it in the spring.”

“What’s it called?” Isabelle asked.

Though they still talked on the phone at least once a week, Isabelle was feeling more and more out of touch lately. Her afternoons were spent far from her phone, wandering the island, reacquainting herself with all the haunts of her past; mornings and evenings found her in the studio, working, more often than not ignoring the phone when it did ring. She had yet to buy an answering machine, so when she did speak on the phone it was usually when she made the call.

“I’m calling it Flesh of the Stone,” Kathy said, “after that story that appeared in Redbook last year.”

“Will it have that story about the whistling man in it?”

Kathy smiled. “That and everything I’ve written since Angels, including two new stories that even you haven’t seen yet.”

“Do I have to wait?”

Kathy reached over with her foot and used her big toe to tap a fat manila envelope lying on the coffee table. “I’ve got copies for you to take home right here.”

“With all your work at the Foundation, I’m surprised you found the time.”

“Well, you know what you always told me,” Kathy said, “you have to make the time.”

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Memory and Dream»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Memory and Dream» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Memory and Dream»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Memory and Dream» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x