Hyperdream / Edition 1

by Hélène Cixous

Overview

Hyperdream is a major new novel by celebrated French author Hélène Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end – and that’s the end. For you, for me.

But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life?

Hyperdream invests this fragile, tentative suspension of disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a sort of magic telephone: a wireless lifeline against all the odds to the dearly departed.

It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death, depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once before and after, but at the same time turning against it, contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately, performatively, as an interruptible interruption.

Hyperdream is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a “treasure of literature” in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend “J.D.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745642994
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	03/23/2009
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Hélène Cixous is one of the world's leading writers. She is the founder and former director of the Centre de Recherche en Études Fémininesat the Université de Paris VIII.

Table of Contents

Translator’s Notes.

Author’s Foreword.

I Before the End.

II Benjamin’s Bedspring.

III A Leave

Editorial Reviews

"Moving, complex and lyrical, it is a crucial work."
The Herald

"The act of writing, Cixous claimed, 'is linked to the experience of disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key to the world'. Hyperdream offers a world full of such absence ... It hovers, dreamily between novel and memoir."
Times Literary Supplement

"Hélène Cixous is today the greatest writer in what I shall call, if I may, my language, French. And I weigh my words in saying this. For a very great writer must be a poet-thinker, very much a poet and a very thinking poet."
Jacques Derrida

From the Publisher