Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

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Memory and Dream: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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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.” —

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“No!” Izzy cried.

But she was too late. Before the word left her throat, the crossbow had been fired. Its shaft plunged into the cat’s chest just as it was spreading its wings in flight. The impact of the blow drove it back against the side of the fire escape. Izzy stared in horror. The crossbow shaft protruded from the tiny creature’s chest—a stiff, unnatural additional limb. There was no blood. Just the limp form of the cat, sprawled in the snow. A living, breathing piece of magic reduced to dead flesh. And the figure, head turning now toward Izzy, features hidden under the shadow of its hood.

Izzy fled. She ran down Lee Street, stumbling through the snow, until she collapsed in the doorway of a grocer’s. There she pressed her face against the cold glass of the display window, her eyes open wide, because if she closed them, the winged cat’s death would play out again in her mind’s eye. She tried to think of something else, but that only brought John back to mind. John. The wild skeltering of her thoughts slowed down as something occurred to her. She remembered something he’d said to her earlier in the evening and heard his voice repeating it now as clearly as if he were standing right beside her instead of only in her memory.

Do you still have those dreams you told me about?

Izzy straightened up from the window. She looked out at Lee Street through the falling snow.

Dreams. This was just a dream. An awful, horrible dream, but that was all. The winged cat wasn’t dead because the painting was safe in the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio where no one could harm it. No one even knew it existed, except for Kathy, and she’d only learned about it tonight.

Standing up, Izzy made her way back out onto the sidewalk. There was no real danger to anyone she’d brought across from John’s before. This was only happening because John had woken the fear of it in her, not because she was dreaming her creations’ actual deaths. It was all “what if”—her mind playing out her fears while she was safely asleep in her bed and the paintings were hidden away, three of them in the greenhouse, John’s in her bedroom.

She started back toward the alleyway. It was harder going because the wind was against her and the snow on the pavement seemed to have risen another foot since she’d fled down it what seemed like only moments before. Her earlier footprints were already filled, the drifts stretching smooth and unmarred.

When she reached the alley and looked down its length to the fire escape, there was no sign of either the winged cat’s corpse or the strange little hooded man with the crossbow.

Turning, she made her way past the diner and started back up Waterhouse Street once more. Just a dream, she told herself as the wind got in under her coat. Her feet felt like blocks of ice in her boots, her cheeks bright red with the cold. But weren’t you supposed to wake up from a dream, once you knew you were dreaming?

She had to laugh at herself. Yeah, right. It wasn’t as though there were rules to dreaming. Dreams were the place where anything could happen. You could play out your fears, or live out a fantasy, but none of it was real. And it all happened at its own pace. It wasn’t as though you could control what you dreamed. She’d heard of people who could, but she’d always put that down to their simply having a good imagination. They weren’t really controlling their dreams—they’d simply convinced themselves that daydreams were real dreams.

The next time she went to the library, she decided, she’d pick up a book on dreaming. Maybe she should just do that now. Dream herself walking over to the Lower Crowsea Public Library and checking out a book. She could dream herself reading it and who knows what her subconscious would make it say. Except, knowing her luck, she’d also dream that the librarian at this time of night—never mind that in the real world the library wasn’t open past nine—was Professor Dapple’s unpleasant manservant. He’d probably hit her on the head with the book, rather than let her take it out.

She became aware of a sound then, realizing that she’d been hearing it for some time—it just hadn’t registered until now. Tick-tappa-tappa-tick-tick-tappa-tick ...

It was like the sound of sticks, rhythmically clacking against each other. Simple wooden clappers. It was odd to hear them here, ticking and tapping so clearly in the hush that the snowfall had placed upon the city.

... tick-tick-tappa-tick-tappa-tappa ...

She hesitated for a moment, then followed the strange sound. It led her down the driveway where Kathy had first seen Paddyjack—now that she had read Kathy’s story, the little man would always be Paddyjack to her. The snow was even deeper here, in between the buildings, and she found herself wishing for the snowshoes that she used to wear back home on the island when she went exploring in the winter fields. As it was, she made her slow way down to the end of the driveway to where a ramshackle garage leaned precariously against its neighbor. In the summer it was overhung with grapevines; tonight it was the heavy snowfall that blurred its shape.

Still following the curious tick-tappa-ticking, she slogged through the narrow path between the two garages and out onto the old carriage lane that lay behind the buildings of Waterhouse Street, separating its properties from the ones on the street one block north. The lane was choked with thigh-high drifts, but Izzy forced her way through them until the lane took her to just behind the building where she and Kathy lived.

Thinking of the little creature from her painting as she had been earlier, she wasn’t at all surprised to find that it was him making the tick-tappa sound. He was crouched up on the fire escape beside her bedroom window, tapping the knobby twiglike fingers of his right hand against the forearm of his left arm.

The railings of the fire escape had all been festooned with torn lengths of long narrow strips of cloth that seemed to have been dyed from a palette of bright primary and secondary colors. Red and yellow and blue. Orange and green and violet. Attached to the fire escape, they were like the streamers of some Maypole gone all askew, fluttering and dancing in the wind as if they were actually keeping time to the strange, almost melodic rhythm that Paddyjack was calling up, fingers rap-a-tapping against his arm.

Tick-tappa-tappa-tick-tick-tappa-tick ...

Izzy was enchanted—by both the scene and the sound. She felt just as if she’d stepped into some winter fairy tale, courtesy of her own and Kathy’s imaginations, rather than the more traditional ones collected by Lang or Grimm. The little treeskin’s presence seemed all the more precious for being here in the middle of the city, with the snowy winds blowing and the streets all hushed except for the lovely music he woke, fingers on limb.

... tick-tick-tappa-tick-tappa-tappa ...

Now if she could only figure out what he was doing. Though why should he have to be doing anything? she immediately asked herself: Couldn’t what he was doing be as natural as birdsong in the spring, the cicada in summer, the geese flying overhead on a crisp autumn day?

Granted, she thought. But then why appear outside her bedroom window? Why the ribbons?

She wondered if he’d talk to her—if he could even talk. Perhaps the only sound he could make was the rhythm he played on his body.

There was only one way to find out.

The small metal gate leading into the backyard behind her building was too bogged down in snowdrifts to open properly, so she moved toward the short chainlink fence separating the lane from the yard, planning to climb over it. And then, hands on the metal bar that ran along the top of the fence, she saw him again—the little hooded figure with his crossbow, creeping along the side of the building where the snow was less deep.

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