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"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind."Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas who, as a result of witnessing his mother's murder, falls into a decades-long coma. Awakened in a seaport town in France, he reconstructs his past through story-telling and myth, resulting in an astonishing exploration of memory and imagination."Ducornet has no time for realism, preferring instead an incredibly pungent, heady and violent brew of words, packed with every maritime image imaginable, in which each sensation seems to be multiplied threefold and each character is ten times larger than life." (London Review of Books 3-26-92)"A book saturated with seawater and myth, a novel rippling with the underwater life of the unconscious, of the bawdy, the drunk and the uninitiated." (Harvard Review 6-92)"A remarkable feat of the imagination." (Booklist 1-15-92, starred review)"Highly recommended." (Library Journal 5-1-92)"[The Fountains of Neptune] bristles with suggested knowledge, with seductions toward symbolic readings. The page is redolent with sensual detail. It is its own kind of dream." (The Denver Post 2-9-92)
