Sarah Bynum: Madeleine Is Sleeping

A National Book Award Finalist A New York Public library Young lions Fiction Award Finalist A Washington Post Book Worldliest Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year “A dream of a book: mysterious, funny, and startlingly beautiful. If we had begun to suspect that American novelists had abandoned their grand and reckless ambitions, here is Sarah Shun-lien Bynum to give us hope.” —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and Specimen Days

This is buoyant, intriguing, lovely, and sui generis. There is much to admire — inventiveness, fine detail, historical allusions that have a pleasing resonance and grace about them. Legerdemain is always a thing to be respected in writing, and in this book, its charms are manifest.” —Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead This was as exciting a story as I remember anyone showing me for years — fresh, imaginative, original, and beautiful* —Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan

“Luminous… Bynum’s lush, poetic imagery is full of vivid, sensuous details one can almost smell, taste, and feel… The most compelling through-line is the sexual awakening of Madeleine… It culminates in a moment of pure physical need and awareness that the author beautifully captures with a reflection that is achingly human and poignantly telling.” —The Boston Globe “Audacious in form and content… Like a dream, this novel fills the mind with tantalizing ambiguity, haunting images, and innocent longings that are slow to fade.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Hypnotic… Madeleine Is Sleeping tiptoes the line between fantasy and reality, between history and myth. It gently suspends the reader in the comfortable twilight moment that comes just before falling asleep. By blurring those distinctions, Bynum makes readers quesdon the extent to which we may be sleepwalking through our lives. And she asks us to discover what our own dreams can teach us. The result is a small, enchanting novel that appeals to the naughty, insolent child in each of us.” —USA Today

“Delicate, grave and almost evanescent… The masterful way [Bynum] has kept her disappearing balls in the air — mostly by means of a voice at once sensuous and humorous, mellifluous and matter-of-fact — reminds of no one, unless it’s that wonderful dream-narrator we all possess, who tells us the most oudandish and dirty stories quite calmly, and doesn’t mind doubling us and others, or making things happen twice at the same time.” —The Washington Post Book World

“In Bynum’s luminous and daring novel, the border between dreams and waking is not so much blurred as erased: Each delicious chapter is like a half-remembered episode from the depths of sleep, as indelible as it is fleeting.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “Deciding what is and isn’t the stuff of dreams is half the fun in this magical, circuitous tale… Madeleine’s past, present and future unfold in short, lyrical, self-contained chapters that flirt between fantasy and reality in charming, matter-of-fact prose, equal parts delightful, intriguing and confusing.” —Time Out New York

“Bynum’s voice is vivid, her use of language incisive and surprising. Perhaps the best thing that can happen in a first novel is just this: that it be unquestionably interesting, that it dare something, and that it leave much to be said. Then the writer has truly set out on her path.” —Bookforum

‘‘Bynum’s lush, mesmerizing sentences pull readers into a circular narrative populated by fantastical characters right out of Alice’s Wonderland.” —The Boston Phoenix “In this lush, earthy and erotic story, the title character, Madeleine, is one part child, one part adventuress and one part adult… The story is captivating, as is the form of the book… A fascinating adventure — one the average reader isn’t likely to forget anytime soon.” —The Capital Times (Madison, WI) “Replete with Kafkaesque metamorphoses, Freudian fantasies, Aesopian justice and religious metaphor, the novel is equal parts fairy tale, fable, romance and bildungsroman… [Those] looking for a challenging, unusual read will be thrilled by the imagination and mysterious energy that haunt this remarkable debut.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[Bynum] crafts this wicked little lullaby with the poise of a master. You might find this little tale invading your Circadian rhythms at night.” —Philadelphia Weekly “Bynum has tapped into the great unconscious, mined the vast pool of imagination and prepared a feast of the exotic, the erotic and the forbidden. Carefully incised, the human heart is revealed: the fragile chambers, the connections, the fumbling toward acceptance and understanding.” —

“The book taps in to what is wonderful about reading… Virtually every page pops with an arresting sentence, a vivid image, or an entire paragraph of plot that you simply have to read again because you don’t believe [Bynum] just said what you thought she said.” —Conversational Reading

hush, mother says. Madeleine is sleeping. She is so beautiful when she sleeps, I do not want to wake her. The small sisters and brothers creep about the bed, their gestures of silence becoming magnified and languorous, fingers floating to pursed lips, tip toes rising and descending as if weightless. Circling about her bed, their frantic activity slows; they are like tiny insects suspended in sap, kicking dreamily before they crystallize into amber. Together they inhale softly and the room fills with one endless exhalation of breath: Shhhhhhhhhhhhh.

a grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Ma tilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Ma tilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.

mme. cochon

on market day, children linger in their doorways. They hide tight, bulging fists behind their backs and underneath their aprons. When Matilde sweeps by, trailing her luxurious rolls of fat behind her, the children shower her. They fling bits of lard, die buttery residue scraped from inside a mother’s churn, the gristle from Sunday dinner’s lamb. The small fistfuls have grown warm and slippery from the children’s kneading, and the air is rich with a comforting, slightly rancid smell. Mme. Cochon, are you hungry? they whisper as she glides by. Matilde thinks she hears curiosity in their voices. She smiles mildly as she continues on, dodging the dogs that have run out onto the street, snuffling at the scraps. It feels, somehow, like a parade. It feels like a celebration.

once, as Matilde made her way through the falling fat, she was startled by a peculiar but not unpleasant throb, which originated in her left shoulder but soon travelled clockwise to the three other corners of her broad back. She wondered if the children were now hurling soup bones, and made an effort to move more swiftly, but suddenly the joyous barrage slowed to a halt. The children stood absolutely still, lips parted, yellow butter dripping onto their shoes. They stared at her with a curiosity Matilde did not recognize. Hearing a restless fluttering behind her, she twisted about and glimpsed the frayed edges of an iridescent wing. With great caution, she flexed her meaty shoulder blades and to her delight, the wing flapped gaily in response. Matilde had, indeed, fledged two pairs of flimsy wings, the lower pair, folded sleekly about the base of her spine, serving as auxiliary to the grander ones above.