Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her most recent book, the story collection Likes, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Madeleine Is SleepingA Novel
A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.
Madeleine Is Sleeping:A Novel -
Madeleine Is SleepingA Novel
As a reward for their bravery and cunning, Mother gives the small children delicious bits of the princess’s body. They are eaten with enormous appetite.
The brothers and sisters, prickling with crumbs, are allowed to tumble, glutted, into Madeleine’s bed. They nuzzle against her and sigh, tucked into the warm pockets of her body. Madeleine stirs in her sleep. She smiles. Mother watches her and wonders, Is she amused by what she dreams?
Madeleine Is Sleeping:A Novel -
Madeleine Is SleepingA Novel
M. Pujol tosses an orange high into the air. He believes he is alone; he hums a tune; he tosses the orange higher and higher, so, that when it grazes the foot of a dryad frisking on the ceiling, and a little bit of painted plaster comes tumbling down from above, M. Pujol freezes, and then, with the toe of his elegant shoe, guides the bit of plaster behind a column.
Madeleine Is Sleeping:A Novel
“Nimble and entertaining . . . The deftness with which she observes and describes her world and its inhabitants is so engaging that . . . Ms. Hempel Chronicles works as an account of how nostalgia—both for what was and might have been—can generate a thousand mercies.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s luminous debut novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award, is one of those mystifying books that dance between fantasy and reality, the dream world and the present moment, humor and pathos. Chock full of metaphors, deftly disguised allegories, allusions, and illusions, it is a hallucinogenic fairy tale that veers between the clinical clarity of hard fact and a surreal mysticism, with a huge fuzzy gray area in the middle that keeps the reader constantly off guard. Nothing is quite as simple as it seems.” —The Boston Globe
“The masterful way [Bynum] has kept her disappearing balls in the air—mostly by means of a voice at once sensuous and humorous, mellifluous and matter-of-fact—reminds of no one, unless it’s that wonderful dream-narrator we all possess, who tells us the most outlandish and dirty stories quite calmly, and doesn’t mind doubling us and others, or making things happen twice at the same time.” —The Washington Post [on Madeleine is Sleeping]
