The Mirror in the Well
Lusher than Marguerite Duras, more tender and erotic than Cormac McCarthy, but nearly as dark.
A woman's sexual awakening is a tragedy when the woman is married to someone other than the man who awakens her. But until then, her marriage, now doomed, was a sleepwalker's tragedy. This novel will shock and offend some readers. Unapologetically explicit in its language, extreme in some of the acts it catalogues, it makes no pretense of submission to middle-class decency, let alone to expectations of happy endings. All three people in this love triangle are flawed, damaged, human. Things fall apart, and the resolution is unclear. Why does she do it? Why should we read it? The answer is one word: Ecstasy. Micheline Aharonian Marcom has a genius for language that is not only beautiful in and of itself, but also engages the heart. Lusher than Marguerite Duras, more tender and erotic than Cormac McCarthy, but nearly as dark, this is a narrative masterpiece.
“The text is filled with unflinchingly rendered sex scenes, stream of consciousness, mythology, dreams and dreamlike realities, all blurred into each other, resulting in a narrative that portrays with disturbing accuracy the intimate behaviors and thoughts of lovers. Through this vivid imagery, Marcom gives voice to the essence of obsession and sexuality while tracing the deterioration of relationships. This novel is a cultural, feminist and human statement, but at its core, it is an unrestrained exploration of the intersection of emotion and physical desires.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Writing with rare candor about female sexuality and cosmic verve about eroticism as a portal to the realm of myth and archetypes, Marcom enters the circle of Anaïs Nin, Annie Ernaux, and Kate Braverman, a flame-fingered poet of the tyranny and divinity of the body, the treachery and radiance of the mind, and the terrors and revelations of ecstasy.”
–Donna Seaman, Booklist
“A wellspring of words, a work as much about sensuality and intimacy as it is about distancing and fragmentation. Her book reveals how profanity and vulgarity, and a throwing of all caution to the wind total surrender to the flesh, may be a portal for redemption and self-awareness, while simultaneously suggesting that this may also lead to uncertainty and loss.”
–John Madera, Tarpaulin Sky