The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Gazelle, by Rikki Ducornet
reviewed by James Sallis

Rikki Ducornet. Gazelle. Knopf, 2003. 208 pp. $21.00.

Rikki Ducornet scares me. I don’t know where all this stuff comes from: the capitalist Tubbs arriving in Egypt and wanting instantly to turn it into a pudding with raisins, Secundo ejaculating into the flames of a public execution. And yet . . . when I teach, I tell my students: write about what frightens and disturbs you. “All my novels do a sort of dance over the coals,” Ducornet has said. Repeatedly, she speaks of writing as waking hallucination, of fiction as a species of magic, of a fiction informed not just by the quotidian and pressures of physical experience but by dreams, reverie, philosophy, and intuition: all the noumena that form the shimmer of our minds at their meeting place with the world. She wants not just to create whole new worlds—which she brilliantly does in Phosphor in Dreamland, the stories of The Word “Desire”, the tetralogy consisting of The Stain, Entering Fire, The Fountains of Neptune, and The Jade Cabinet—but to take in the whole of this one as well, to mark its imprint on her soul, to possess it. In Gazelle the story is of a young girl coming to age and sexuality in Egypt. Her beautiful blond mother has departed; her father, olive-skinned and dark of hair like herself, has sunk into an obsession with chess and war games; and she has been taken under wing by a family friend, the perfumer Ramses Ragab. As always, Ducornet writes of the eternal struggle, within and without, between forces of repression and those of liberation, trying to retrieve for self and characters a space in which creation and transformation remain possible. “I believe,” she has said, “in the sexual soul.”