The Dreaming Girl

Praise for The Dreaming Girl

A Novel

Published by Painted Leaf Press

Roberta Allen's THE DREAMING GIRL takes the disorientation of travel to splendid extremes. As a young woman in the jungles of Belize describes her brief affair with a man known only as the German, her observations slip back and forth between straightforward description and an impressionistic dreamworld. Allen's spare, lulling prose evokes tangible loneliness and compelling oddness--the kind that sneaks up on you.
--Michael Miller, Voice Choices

THE VILLAGE VOICE
Roberta Allen's Surreal Romance

Told in a series of elliptical tableaux and bound by stream of consciousness, Roberta Allen's THE DREAMING GIRL is an example of everything that shouldn't work, and yet it does. Like a literary descendant of Duras, Allen places her unnamed narrator in an exotic Central American limbo that propels her mind into a mesmerizing state somewhere between memory and fantasy. Traveling alone, the narrator eagerly invites the company of a stranger who is referred to only as the "the German." She had wanted to meet somebody. It was lonely traveling by herself. Since the last one left her she has been lonely."

The minimalist surrealism of Allen's prose is perfectly suited to transposing into words the inexpressible wonder of being at the mercy of the Central American climate. "The rains make her mind murky. When it rains, she sails within herself like a boat that has lost direction; she drifts. The rains haven't started yet tonight. But even on the clearest nights, the stars are vague, as though they aren't sure they want to be there."

As the pair travel across the jungle landscape, their physical love affair becomes part of the dense jungle scenery--the dogs milling around the dining tables, the insects multiplying faster than the German can shoo them from their bed--until finally it becomes tantalizingly difficult to know how much of the dreamlike imagery is inspired by their passion, and how much of the narrator's desire is fed not by an actual romance but by her willful retreat into fantasy. Even after the German rejects her, the woman continues to pursue him across the country, as well as in her dreaming. It becomes clear that she possesses an insatiable desire to numb herself through travel, sex, and daydreams. "She is twenty-one. She is never going back...She needs to see something that will make her forget...she needs to see something big and dramatic."

A more lucid variation on the incantatory, erotic opening of D.M. Thomas's THE WHITE HOTEL, THE DREAMING GIRL succeeds as a portrait of sexual longing and, as the girl's fate floats ambiguously in a pool of water, the merciless insignificance of our species.

--Ken Foster

Bloomsbury Review

"The writing is extraordinary. Roberta Allen's descriptions are poetic, from commonplace incidents to the grandeur of nature...The short journey is filled with poignant and disturbing views of the human scene, with a sometimes sobering look at our own fantasies."

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2001

The Dreaming Girl is a warm, erotic book, not merely in its story and imagery, but in the very way its prose is structured. Delivered in an easy, unadorned rhythm, the sentences are disarmingly short, like the plain, unaffected sentences in Gertrude Stein's Ida. The paragraphs, too, are disarmingly small, and set apart from one another in blocks that heighten the materiality of the language. Reading this book has the effortless tug of slow water in a jungle, the buoyant languor of a dream.

Situated chiefly in Belize and Guatemala, the narrative concerns the brief romance between two travelers: a young woman whose name and history are never divulged (though she is aptly described as "raw life waiting to be formed"), and a young, handsome German, referred to throughout as simply "the German." The namelessness and obscurity of the central characters adds to the dreamlike quality of their encounter. We do not know why these two people are visiting Central America or the specific circumstances that have brought about their encounter. The story concentrates instead on their irresistible sexual attraction, the elemental energy that drives the mangroves, the pale green lizards, and the blood pumping through the veins of the two lovers. Yet there is an odd innocence about it all, as in Henri Rousseau's paintings of charmed tropical settings.

Allen makes clear, however, that this is no paradise. A racist hotel keeper glowers menacingly at the gleaming white bodies of the lovers when they shower in the open. Fetid smells, bat droppings, roaring mokeys, and hard rains enliven every page. There is clearly a sinister presence in the jungle, but it is described as matter-of-factly as the poisonous coral snakes killed in the road. There is no sharp division between good and evil in this story, no clear delineation between wakefulness and dream, or personal identity and the hypnotic inevitability of one's actions. All is blended together, "life touching life."
--John Olson