![]() ![]() One early chapter is titled, “Dream House as Not a Metaphor.” Over time, though, it mutates into “a den of debauchery, “a haunted house,” “a prison” and “a dungeon of memory.” The Dream House, in Bloomington, Ind., is where Machado lives, intermittently, with her abusive girlfriend. She quotes a remark by the sculptor Louise Bourgeois that memory is “a form of architecture” and a declaration by the novelist Zora Neale Hurston: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” A quotation from a play by the English writer Patrick Hamilton annotates her title: “Your mind so tired that it can no longer work at all.…You dream…maliciously and incessantly.” Machado sets the stage with a trio of epigraphs. ![]() As a bonus, the story veers unexpectedly, albeit with some foreshadowing, toward a happy ending (even as she interrogates the very notion of endings). But it never dispels its momentum.Īnd though the relationship she chronicles, often with graphic candor, is indeed dark, her prose is exhilarating and precise. Her digressive use of myth, literary, and cinematic archetypes (“Bluebeard,” “Gaslight”), and queer history does complicate the narrative. Unbound by chronology, Machado wanders through her life, recalling childhood insecurities and adolescent crushes, flashing forward to the writing of this book. Bite-sized chapters bear such titles as “Dream House as Heat Death of the Universe” and “Dream House as Tragedy of the Commons” – pretentious, to be sure, but also provocative and apt. ![]()
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