Memories are waiting all around, beckoning him, and when he tosses a hazelnut into the water, the ripples carry across his mind as he remembers “everything.”įirst, that he and Lettie used to call the pond the ocean. When he rambles through her farm, when he follows the trail to the duck pond, he might as well be traveling through time. The novel begins when a man, the narrator, returns to his childhood home in Sussex, England, where he long ago knew a girl named Lettie Hempstock. “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet,” Neil Gaiman writes in his slim, dark dream of a new novel, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” “But they are never lost for good.” Who we used to be sometimes seems like a faint shadow of who we are now, but Gaiman helps us remember the wonder and terror and powerlessness that owned us as children.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |