WENDY WALKER

Knots
REVIEWS:

"Fantasy prevails in Wendy Walker's KNOTS (four stories from collections originally published by another small press); one inspired by medieval chuch labyrinths, one by a tale from the brothers Grimm, the other two by medieval fables written by Marie de France and 'one of her imitators.' Opener 'The Cathedral' shows in just a few pages how Walker can make antique matters into something all her own, as an ornamented Gothic pile comes to life in a dialog of statues-- angels, saints and gargoyles, whose 'stone voices ... query from niches, fling from the buttresses, and drop in comment from the towers and eaves.' The final Author's Notes cite a Latin phrase that translates as 'The sluggish mind rises to truth through the things of this world.' Forget the 'sluggish' part (Walker has a very quick wit) and attend to the THINGS, for it's her eccentric mingling of ideas and imagery, sensory impressions of a world almost disturbingly alive, that distinguish her work from anyone else's."
--Faren Miller, Locus

Chained Books
Books as sculptural objects that address the issues of knowledge and danger. Titles include OF HUMAN BONDAGE, THE LAST PURITAN, CRIMINAL INTELLIGENCE, THE ETHICS OF DUST and THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME. All are currently on exhibit at the Proteus Gowanus Gallery/Reading Room in Brooklyn as part of the current show "Libraries." (See link.)

Balthus' Picture-Book
Chapter One on Balthus' concern with the reworking and weaving of "eternal stories." Chapter Two on his "self-portraits." Chapter Three on his drawings for WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Chapter Four on his picture-book MITSOU.

BLUE FIRE: Confessing Constance Kent
The manuscript of BLUE FIRE, designed by Florence Neal, will be on exhibit at the Proteus Gowanus Gallery/Reading Room in Brooklyn in the upcoming show LIBRARIES, in the section devoted to the Oulipo.

An excerpt of BLUE FIRE has just been published in MARGINALIA, ed. Alicita Rodriguez. Another excerpt will be published soon in the Green Integer Review, at www.greeninteger.com, edited by Douglas Messerli.

My Man and Other Critical Fictions
Because of repeated delays by Green Integer, I am now seeking another publisher for this book.

A critical fiction, "Olaudah Equiano Crosses the Ice" is currently online at
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/equiano

The Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist of Life
REVIEWS:

"Nine retellings of traditional fairy, folk and religious tales, reshaped and enriched with insight, detail, and Walker's precise, poetic language.
"Adult fairy tales are usually tongue-in-cheek, pornographic or psychoanalytic. Not these: Walker remains true to the spirit of her source material while giving it grown-up appeal. She takes stories drawn from the oral tradition and moves them over to the literary tradition, turning archetypes into individuals, adding some psychological motivation, dark irony, and a touch of metaphysics. In the title story, the Princess Mengarde, who has executed 97 aspirants to her hand, views the latest suitors through a window 'which was revelatory of various degrees of cunning.' She sees that the 'eldest possessed that bluff professionalism that veils deep dishonesty,' while 'the second disclosed to her observation the laziness of the capable man, who need not think anything through because he owns a strong arm and a deceptively winning smile.' Another window reveals motive, right down to 'the ravenous hunger of birds in their graceful swoop, and the love of destiny in the inwinding curve of the road.' Walker's imagery is especially suggestive with characters who stand midway between man and beast: In 'Ashiepattle,' the King remembers his first glimpse of the Queen-to-be: '...the ragged convolvulus of her enormous ballooning sleeves, iridescent blue, green and white, like the splayed abstraction of mallards hung on a door.'
"A tribute to the magical, folkloric heritage of Western Europe, these literary fairy tales may even raise an occasional adult frisson."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"The nine tales in this collection, Walker's first published work, are elegantly gaudy revivifications of folk/fairy stories in a kind of jeweled, poetic prose. Walker's sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood. In each tale, familiar motifs lie embedded, recombined and transformed through the alchemy of the author's heady imagination. Outstanding is "Arnaud's Nixie,' a variation of the Cupid and Psyche legend. where Esperte undergoes ordeals and quests to recover her darling Arnaud, snatched from her by a cruel lady of the lake. Women who jam their blistered feet into a slipper to catch a melancholy prince's attention turn up in the exquisite 'Ashiepattle,' a tale whose heroine has birdlike affinities, wears a bizarrely furred and feathered gown, and flutters high in a dovecote. The despised, poor or clumsy suitor who wins a princess through some special gift or charm appears in 'The Unseen Soldier,' and in the title story. 'The Contract with the Beast,' a labyrinthine adventure echoing the tale of Beauty and the Beast, has a winsome hedgehog for its hero. Deliciously quirky twists and unexpected endings increase the reader's surprise and delight."
-- Publishers Weekly

"For those who cannot wait to find themselves lost in the unknown, look for Wendy Walker's THE SEA-RABBIT..."
-- Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Metamorphoses of castigation, of appeasement, of flight, of preservation: every variety of metamorphosis found in the texts of the ancients serves an apparently naive, but perfectly controlled, narrativity. Walker does not exploit this solely for the production of the marvelous: into her legendary canvas she slips many a metafictional thread which the eye must follow with attention... It can hardly be doubted that beyond sumptuously written texts which tempt us to delightful readings, beyond the ancient wonders of rediscovered childhood, what we are invited to witness is the metamorphosis of the fairy tale."
--Marc Chenetier, New Literary History

"... haunting images that fuse the past with the present."
-- Jack Zipes, Los Angeles Times

The Secret Service
REVIEWS:

"A rose is a man is a rose--
"That a late 20th century literary masterpiece should slip by unheralded, hardly available, is commonplace. The status of Wendy Walker's THE SECRET SERVICE is recognized by its American publishers, Sun and Moon, who have issued it in their "Classics" series, but sadly it remains extremely hard to find in the States. let alone elsewhere.
"Set in a 19th-century Europe that does not quite obey the contours of the real place, the story concerns a dastardly plot against the British royal family, led by three scheming continental notables. These three, a German, an Italian and a Frenchman, are also obsessive collectors, aesthetes dedicated to their respective fields of expertise: roses, rare tableware, classical statuary.
"In order to infiltrate the enemy, the British secret service have developed a remarkable weapon. By scientific methods they can transform their agents into physical objects, indistinguishable from the real thing. Thus the British spies can turn themselves into a rare perfect rose, a superb antique glass or a Roman sculpture, and observe the villains from very close quarters. This transformation operates as far more than a gimmick. Rather, Walker uses it as a far reaching, exhaustive metaphor for the nature of being human, and as a generator of exceptional language.
"The book begins with a ceremonial banquet for the marriage of the young king and queen, to which the three villains have been expressly invited in order to be seduced by the beautiful objects before them, little realising they are all in fact human spies. The table is covered by the entire British secret service masquerading as a tumbler, plate or vase, all straining to catch the attention of the enemy and be taken home to their collections.
"The result is like a fin de siecle Ruritanian adventure re-written by Gertrude Stein and Ronald Firbank. We read detailed descriptions not only of what it is like to be a rose, but also, for example the dream of a rose, what passes through a rose while it sleeps, from the point of view of the flower itself.
"And THE SECRET SERVICE, despite its historic setting, has become curiously topical. The plot to overthrow the institution of the British monarchy by introducing marital scandal into its ranks, has recently become more vivid a notion than Walker could ever have imagined.
"But in an even more extraordinary example of life, or technology catching up with the imagination, what would previously have been the most unfilmable of books, has become a highly feasible movie project. For the process of 'morphing,' seen at its most advanced in TERMINATOR 2, reproduces on screen exactly what Walker describes, the transformation of humans into physical objects and back again. THE SECRET SERVICE is the first masterpiece of the age of morphing."
--Adrian Dannatt, The Independent (UK)


"Walker's brilliant novel tells the story of an elaborate nineteenth-century Catholic conspiracy against the English monarchy, complete with dastardly continental noblemen-- aesthetes of prodigious sophistication and guile-- and a mysterious heiress sequestered in a tower impregnable. Walker's astonishing conceit is that the three principal British agents of the eponymous secret service have the capacity to transform themselves into objects, the better to spy upon the conspirators: Polly is a crystal wine goblet set before the Baron Schelling, a connoisseur of glass and porcelain; Rutherford is a salmon rose tantalizing the Duc d'Elsir and swaying where there is no breeze; and the aging chief of the service, the 'Corporal,' is a bronze statue of Thisbe standing near the diabolical Cardinal Ammanati. Mind and perception are dependent upon the form of their container: the opening passage of the novel describes the lavish British banquet of state from the persepctive of Polly, whose perceptions have altered as she took on a new shape; elsewhere in the novel, Rutherford's rose consciousness unfolds in 'timeless plenitude' and a language of fragrances charged with psychological meaning; and the Corporal's meditiations in bronze are given form. This is no hollow fantasy of manners, for Walker's alternate history is a Europe that knows electricity but not yet the automobile; in which a promiscuous servant girl and the wife of a bankrupt gambling Irish peer can alter the course of world history; it is an England that does not know the long stability of Victoria's reign yet in which certain teutonic habits of mind are nonetheless present. The novel is filled with strange erudition, sensuous descriptive language, broken glass, crackpot science, gruesome technology, unexpected turns, and a succession of stories within stories: excerpts from scientific papers describe the physics of the process by which the spies are transformed; the tragic fate of the Marchioness of Tralee, who remains at the center of the conspiracy after her death, in the memories of her three lovers; and the life of the mysterious Rosamund. The two most notable passages are chapter nine, almost a novel-within-a-novel that describes Polly's healing journey to the city of Or (after the goblet she is inhabiting breaks in two); and the fevered attempt of the Baron to transform himself into living porcelain, in the course of which he becomes convinced that ALL the objects in his castle have become part of the British effort to counter the conspiracy. This is THE underrated book of the 1990s, a work of astonishing complexity that grows more interesting with each reading."
--Henry Wessells, The New York Review of Science Fiction

Stories Out of Omarie
REVIEWS:

"In her STORIES OUT OF OMARIE, Wendy Walker has given us English versions of eight medieval tales based on lays of Marie de France and her school. Marie, the supreme author of some of the best short romantic poems of her time, and who spent much of her life at the English court of Henry II (she may have been his half-sister), took a number of her stories from earlier oral sources popularized by the Breton jongleurs. The stories in Walker's collection range over Europe and Northern Africa, but especially Brittany and England. They represent some of the best tales available to the English court in the twelfth century. These stories, like so many others of the tradition, in their poetic form, are the stuff of Old English and early Middle English literature, stories that will be retold by Chaucer and other writers right down to the present.
"'The Passing of Graelent' has an Arthurian theme; the Queen loves the knight Graelent, who does not return her love. Instead he meets a beautiful enchantress in the forest who exacts a promise, 'that you will keep your love for me an absolute secret!' He reveals her name at Court; the lady appears and saves him from dishonor, but later she allows him to drown. In 'Laustic,' a husband shows his frustration over his wife's love for a neighbor by crushing the life out of a pet nightingale. 'The Children of Montjoie' is 'a story like all stories, of two lovers.' In 'The Twin Knots' Venus thinks she is the narratoir of a tale about a knight who wins the love of an unhappy queen who, it turns out, is the creator of the tale. 'A Story Out of Omarie' reminds us of the proximity of Islam to Europe in the Middle Ages, when a count's daughter could be set adrift in a barrel as punishment for attempting to kill her husband, (and be) rescued by a sultan, and made his consort. The last two stories are extremely brief: 'Swan Hunger,' about two lovers who use a swan to carry letters back and forth, and 'Goatleaf,' yet another telling of the Tristan story. What makes this collection valuable to the lover of early English literature is Wendy Walker's 'impeccable and densely rich style,' a style that runs throughout these tales of forbidden love."
--Jack Byrne, The Review of Contemporary Fiction



"...a feminist perspective that celebrates the power of women as storytellers."
-- Jack Zipes, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales


"...tales...exotic and medieval in tone but Postmodern in their reinterpretation of the role of women and the powers of the storyteller."
-- John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy