Hyperdream

1. Edition February 2009
176 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Hyperdream is a major new novel by celebrated French author
Hélène Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning
anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human
certainties: you die in the end - and that's the end.
For you, for me.
But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of
life?
Hyperdream invests this fragile, tentative suspension of
disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a
sort of magic telephone: a wireless lifeline against all the odds
to the dearly departed.
It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book
which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death,
depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once
before and after, but at the same time turning against it,
contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately,
performatively, as an interruptible interruption.
Hyperdream is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a
tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it
transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a
"treasure of literature" in the form of a bed,
purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept
on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend
"J.D."
Author's Foreword.
I Before the End.
II Benjamin's Bedspring.
III A Leave
The Herald
"The act of writing, Cixous claimed, 'is linked to the
experience of disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key
to the world'. Hyperdream offers a world full of such
absence ... It hovers, dreamily between novel and memoir."
Times Literary Supplement
"Hélène Cixous is today the greatest writer in what I
shall call, if I may, my language, French. And I weigh my words in
saying this. For a very great writer must be a poet-thinker, very
much a poet and a very thinking poet."
Jacques Derrida