- Hardcover: 192 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (22 Jan 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747552851
- ISBN-13: 978-0747552857
- Product Dimensions: 20.2 x 14.4 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 378,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Amaryllis Night and Day
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
In the darkness the present lost its hold and the past, stirring in its sleep, turned its face to me and whispered a name.Amaryllis Night and Day follows one man into the roots of love in a tender and unsettling journey of intermingling dream and memory. Successful painter Peter Diggs is pulled into the dreams--and secret life--of Amaryllis, a mysterious and beautiful woman with a desperate link to his past. As he struggles to resist or understand their deepening connection, he finds himself more and more disrupted by the shifting floors of reality and illusion, and ever more uncertain of what lies ahead. Where the book attempts furtive reaches into the unfamiliar, it stumbles into the queer compromise of allusion. Where it attempts to dislodge conventions, it drops into an affected discord of peripheral detail. Where it succeeds, however, is in the author's impressive ability to withdraw, to relax his grip and allow the pervasive incompleteness to remain undefined; and to ride the strange crude wave until it breaks.
As is true of Hoban's other works--Turtle Diary, The Medusa Frequency, Angelica's Grotto, to name a few--the intricate story is not pressed or jerked out, but seems to quietly rise from the dream fog. Love and unusual meetings, improbable surfaces and shimmering paradoxes, fears and apparitions, curious irritations and a very real sensitivity combine to make Amaryllis Night and Day a minor masterpiece. --Michael Kedda
Review
'Hoban writes with such wide-eyed wonder as to suggest that keeping the beautiful mysteries of the world intact is more important than solving them' METRO
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I have to say that what first attracted me to this book was it's beautifully designed cover and after reading the first line, I had to force myself to read the rest of it slowly, like eating an expensive chocolate bar with a pin, because it was so good, I just didn't want it to end. Each chapter is short (tantalizingly bitesized!), which gets you straight into the rhythm of the waking and dreaming life of the main character, Peter Diggs. With exquisitly simple yet somehow vastly expansive language, the author brings us into the dream world in which Peter finds himself, guided by the enigmatic girl he meets there, then alternatly contrasts this with waking hours, spent in and around London. The author imbues moments of everyday life with as much meaning and strange beauty as the dreams, making a stroll out of South Kensington tube station something to savour and a walk in Islington feel like an adventure full of possibilities. Reading his descriptions of London allowed me to see the city through new eyes and with a fresh enthusiasm...(anyone feeling jaded with London living should give it a try for this alone) and I especially loved reading it on the tube as it made me feel very differently about who my fellow passengers might be! Hoban succeeds so totally in writing believably about such a difficult to describe subject, (dreams), that it feels as if you have DREAMT what he writes, as it looses nothing in the translation onto paper. This, combined with the gorgeous presentation (right down to the choice of typeface) makes Amaryllis Night and Day a perfect book, both as an object AND a piece of writing. It's so engaging that you might even find, as I did, that the characters manage to find their way into your own dreams!
Format:Hardcover
I don't think this is one of Russell Hoban's best books, but it is one of my favourites.
There is something about the interlacing of the dream world and reality, and of the dream-as-fantasy and dream-as-nightmare too, that I find continually haunts my waking and sleeping moments...
Amaryllis is a great heroine, with her different aspects waking and dreaming, her t-shirts and her elusiveness; and Peter Diggs' sense of loss pervades so much of his life as well as his art; one can't help hoping that they can both jump off the bus before it reaches its terrible destination. And of course, RH's own fantasies play a major part in the book.
As ever, much of the delight is in the telling of the story and Hoban's wonderfully sparse and telling use of language. And it contains on of my favourite Hoban one-liners: 'Trust me, I'm a weirdo.'
There is something about the interlacing of the dream world and reality, and of the dream-as-fantasy and dream-as-nightmare too, that I find continually haunts my waking and sleeping moments...
Amaryllis is a great heroine, with her different aspects waking and dreaming, her t-shirts and her elusiveness; and Peter Diggs' sense of loss pervades so much of his life as well as his art; one can't help hoping that they can both jump off the bus before it reaches its terrible destination. And of course, RH's own fantasies play a major part in the book.
As ever, much of the delight is in the telling of the story and Hoban's wonderfully sparse and telling use of language. And it contains on of my favourite Hoban one-liners: 'Trust me, I'm a weirdo.'
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderfully clever book, full not only of interesting bits of knowledge and insight from Klein bottles to Edward Hopper, but also a multitude of (eventually) interlinked threds, memories and dreams. I was surprised, among all these facts, to find The Tinderbox by Hans Christian Andersen attributed to his contemporaries the Grimm brothers, but the details remain so convincing that I am not at all sure that Hoban is not right and the biographers wrong. After all, this is a superb and convincing story of alternative interlaced realities which surprises and delights.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Magical
A very short, profoundly affecting book.
Wonderful, can't stop thinking about it.
Wonderful, can't stop thinking about it.
Published on 26 Dec 2003 by D. Hare
Quite lovely...
... soothing, melancholy and like trying to grab hold of mist. It doesn't seem like it should work- try explaining to someone what it's about and you immediately sound unbelievably... Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2002 by Jennifer Colgan
good but not as good as earlier stuff
another journey into the spontaneous world of russel hoban's imagination, except that with his more recent writings he seems to have lost something universally quirky, and become... Read more
Published on 15 Mar 2001
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