Sara Whym
Dreamscapes I — Betrayals (101 & 202 Nights)

Combining fiction, poetry, and theater, this hybrid trilogy begins as Maia, a writer from the borderlands, finally committing to her life’s work, suddenly beholds the vision of Ondine, a child she had desired yet reluctantly aborted 23 years earlier. Though Maia tries at first to discern and dismiss what is behind this spectral presence, the girl takes on a will and traits of her own, some evoking her father (who never knew a thing about her), others her “younger” siblings, but mostly recalling Lise, Maia’s mother, captured as a 5-year old in a 1920s photo.

Long guarded in the darkness by Hetna, Maia’s maternal grandmother, Ondine emerges to act as her wayward mother’s ethereal helper, spurring her on to weave a protective veil of stories, under which the two can meet: tales spun from the threads of everyday life — dreams, memories, and sensations that pass through her nights and days. Inverting the diversionary tactics of Scheherazade, Maia thus finds the courage to return to her writing desk each morning, delivering, in episodic reprisals, words that expose and disperse unfathomable truths belonging to their marvelous yet strange and deeply troubled family; tales resurrected for Ondine so that she too might redeem some form of life.

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The nexus of disasters that Maia must work through makes it impossible to relay the story of her “vraie vie” (true life, as Proust put it) in a linear manner. So she tells it instead in the ever-broken and revolving, layered way she experiences it, often reflecting works of literature, music, and art that have marked her to create, instead of a tightly knit narrative, a spacious, suggestive mosaic; one that leaves gaps for the thoughts and dreams of others to shine through.