Jade Cabinet

by Rikki Ducornet, Rikki Ducornet (Afterword)

Overview

Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertilizer, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues will plot a bloody revenge. The fourth element in a tetralogy of novels - Earth (The Stain), Fire (Entering Fire), Water (The Fountains of Neptune) and Air - The Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power. Following the novel is an afterword, "Waking to Eden, " in which Ducornet reflects on the sources for her writing and on the quartet of novels completed by The Jade Cabinet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628975369
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	10/15/2024
Series:	Dalkey Archive Essentials
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	158

About the Author

Rikki Ducornet is a transdisciplinary artist. Her work is animated by an interest in nature, Eros, tyranny and the transcendent capacities of the creative imagination. She is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and artist, and her fiction has been translated into fifteen languages. Her art has been exhibited internationally, most recently with Amnesty International’s traveling exhibit I Welcome, focused on the refugee crisis. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard College Arts and Letters Award, the Prix Guerlain, a Critics’ Choice Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her novel The Jade Cabinet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Read an Excerpt

Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real. The ambiguity so delighted my father that with my mother’s permission I was named Memory—a curious coincidence considering this memoir which has seized the lion’s part of my relic years. I write from the new century about the old, my purpose to reanimate planets that have long ceased to spin.

Editorial Reviews

Air is the subject of this last volume of Ducornet's Tetralogy of the Elements, set in Victorian England. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is the fourth novel in Ducornet's brilliant and provocative tetralogy based on the elements--in this instance, air. The story is told by Memory, whose father, an eccentric natural historian, believes that her sister, Etheria, will bring forth the Primal Speech of Adam if she never hears a spoken word. Her resultant muteness and the etherial quality of her pale beauty hover over this magical, surreal tale. All the photographs taken of the two girls by their delightful neighbor, Lewis Carroll, are destroyed by the jealous Tubbs, a gross, abusive industrialist to whom Etheria is given in marriage. He violates her with a jade phallus, and, when he begins to raze her beloved gardens (they lack symmetry and are seen as unsafe), she flees. Etheria reappears years later as a magician named Zephyra--or so the aging, remorseful Tubbs wants to believe. Rich in subplots (e.g., Tubbs's plan to pulverize thousands of ancient ibis mummies into fertilizer and potions) and bizarre characters (a lusty harpy of a hunger artist who stalks Tubbs with a silver pistol), this lovely, exotic fiction is highly recommended.-- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc . , Ohio

Library Journal

A profound belief in the power of language leads a man to use his firstborn as material for experimentation in his quest for the keys to universal language. Though his daughter is able to understand language and its relationship to the world, the experiments leave her mute. This voiceless woman enchants those around her, including her cruel industrialist husband, who endeavors to have her and from whom she escapes only through magic, which she studies before the day she vanishes "forever in thin air like a puff of smoke." Both before and after this vanishing, she enchants her sister, Memory, who tells the mute woman's story. Memory pulls together the other characters' words by including their memoirs, journals, and diaries--a narrative technique that, along with the power of Memory's narration, makes this novel about language and silence most audible.

Lindsay Throm

Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around.”—The Nation

From the Publisher