Clairvoyant.The Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce

New York USA: Hyperion Press. This beautifully written and bold novel recreates the troubled inner life of James Joyce's mentally ill daughter, Lucia. Falling somewhere between the novels of Celine and Jean Rhys, Clairvoyant combines merriment with misery, the real with the unreal, and plunges the reader into a labyrinth of strange yet exhilarating imagination. Although Lucia was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, James Joyce, unlike his wife, refused to believe his daughter was truly mentally ill. Instead he thought her to be clairvoyant, equipped with gifts that could be understood by few people. The author has created the tortured imagined life of this forgotten woman. By turns engrossing and compelling, Clairvoyant not ony sheds new light on one of world literature's most towering figures, it also lets us into the mind - and heart - of a woman whose life has been overshadowed by that brilliant, but far from perfect, literary artist. Drawn from factual details of the Joyce family and their contemporaries - which include Carl Jung and Samuel Beckett - and through a mixture of memory, dream, and hallucination, Clairvoyant is a stirring tribute to Lucia's ability to survive in the face of a most mysterious and terrible illness. Slight mark on front cover. . Very Good. Boards. First Edition. 1992.