Praise
for The Daughter
A Memoir In Short Shorts
Published by Autonomedia
"Roberta Allen transmits the
pain and compensating strangeness of living in vignettes
as urgent and enigmatic as telegrams. This is a
stunning memoir."
--John
Ashbery
"Snapshots of the ineffable. In disquieting
landscapes often distorted by the gaze of the other,
Roberta Allen manages to tell with the language
of subtlety the most poignant of stories."
--Luisa
Valenzuela
"In Roberta Allen's novella The Daughter,Daddy
is a shadowy figure, perhaps a gangster, and the
daughter is a divided traveler, lost in jungles,
memories, dreams...each chapter, none more than
four pages, tells a fragmentary story, a psychic
skit hinting at far larger dramas...But even as
the daughter dips in and out of past and present,
she is subject to a countervailing desire to fly
past all the nets of place and identity, of family,
gender, even language itself. Secretly, this female
figure appears to long to be not a book but a landscape:
various, indeterminate, unending. This perverse
and magical wish, like a very important guest star,
is thrilling whenever it is glimpsed. In one of
the most elated passages, a woman traveling through
Peru imagines herself metamorphosing into a mountain:"
"Dust would fill her mouth, and satisfy her
hunger...She would turn brown and gray and grayish
green...Eucalyptus would take root on her darkned
body, dry scrub and an occasional orchid would grow.
Her hair like slender swaying branches would break
in the wind. Hummingbirds would nest in her hair.
Butterfly wings would graze her eyelids."
Excerpt
from review by Stacy D'Erasmo,Voice Literary Supplement
"Roberta Allen writes like a latterday Boccaccio."
--Library
Journal
