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Mister Sandman

ISBN: 1883642337/ ISBN-13: 9781883642334

Mister Sandman

(Hardcover)

by Barbara Gowdy

4 out of 5 1 Customer reviews

Steerforth Press, 04/1997, 268 pages, English

This novel about an eccentric Canadian family was named "Book of the Year" by Margaret Atwood in the "Times Literary Supplement".

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Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust...

Description: Very Good. 1883642337 light wear to soft cover / good clean...

Description: Fine. 1883642337 Fine.

Description: Fine.

Description: A former library book with the usual identifiers in a protective...

Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust...

Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear....

Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily...

Description: Good in good dust jacket. Ex-library. mylar jacket, normal...

Description: Fine. Softcover with very light shelf wear.

Description: Very Good. This copy has some library marks or stickers.

Description: Near Fine.

Description: Fine. Trade paperback very good no notes or marks.

Description: Very Good/Very Good DJ/Very Good. 1-883642-33-7 Ex. Lib. Copy....

Description: Very Good. A stated first edition, first printing with full...

Description: Very Good. 1883642337 very good.

Description: FINE in FINE jacket. HARDBACK-STD. pp. 268.00.

Description: Very good.

Description: Fine. 1883642337 First American Edition. Fine in fine dust...

Description: Fine. Book has been read and shows minimal signs of wear.

Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards....

Description: Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. Hardcover. Steerforth Press,...

Description: Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. First...

Description: Like New in Like New jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Signed by...

Description: Very Good. 1883642337 First American edition hardback. All...

Reviews of {0} by {1}
Top 50 Contributor Top 50 Contributor
Customer rating: 4 out of 5 4 out of 5
Mister Sandman, Jul 12, 2009
By BeckyJG, Harbor City, CA

"I knew I was in for a treat when I opened my copy of the new edition of Barbara Gowdy's 1995 novel Mister Sandman, and saw that the foreword was written by Katherine Dunn, author of the weird and wonderful Geek Love. I wasn't disappointed.

Set in Toronto in the late fifties through the early seventies, Mister Sandman is the story of the Canarys, a most unusual family. Father Gordon works at a publishing house, editing potboilers. He's quiet and deep, and he--like everyone in the novel--has a secret. A very big secret. Mother Doris is an habitual liar ("the truth is just a version" she famously says) who's built a past as an actress and now raises three children. She has a secret, too. Sonja is the eldest of the three girls, and her secret is that the youngest of the three is her daughter. Marcy is the middle girl, smart and aware. And then there's Joan.

The eternally innocent Sonja is seduced--or raped?--by a man we later discover to be extremely important to others in the family. Doris immediately determines that they must go to her great aunt in Vancouver, where Sonja can have the baby and no one will be the wiser. There is never any thought of not keeping the baby and raising her as Doris and Gordon's third daughter.

Joan is lovely: tiny, delicate, and pale, she is physically an eternal child . She doesn't talk or write, but she has the gifts of music and insight. Joan is the literary descendant of Gunter Grass's Oskar, who at the age of three wills himself not to grow any bigger, and of Irving's Lily Berry, who just stops growing; like them, despite her tiny stature she has emotional, spiritual, and intellectual capacities far beyond her apparent years--and far beyond those of everyone around her as well.

Joan is, for most of the book, the secret keeper of the family. All are drawn to her and each feels the need to confide in her. She knows all of the lies and the deceptions, she knows the joys, the pleasures (both conventional and illicit), she knows what everybody wants. In the end, it seems, she knows what they need, too, although they don't know it themselves. And, as almost always happens, the secrets will be told.

Words and language are very important in Mister Sandman. Joan speaks a language of soft clicks and hisses and moos and meows, perfect imitations of the noises she hears around her and mostly intelligible to her family. Sonja hears her mother's declaration that "the truth is just a version" as "the truth is just aversion." The words pour out of Gordon and Doris and Marcy and even the dull Sonja, and Joanie absorbs them all. What she does with them in the end is her gift to her "darlings," her family.

Mister Sandman is magical--dreams are prophetic, transformative, sometimes shared by more than one person. It's tragic, full of betrayal, despair, revelation. It's funny. It's excruciatingly erotic, often at the most awkward of times. Occasionally the novel verges on being cloyingly quirky, but there's always just enough nastiness lurking at the edges to pull it back into the realm of the weird and the wonderful."

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