SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM spent almost a decade shaping her debut novel, Madeleine is Sleeping (Harcourt). Seven weeks after its release, the book was named among five finalists for the National Book Award for fiction, the winner of which will be announced on Wednesday at New York's Marriott Marquis.
Chinese-American Bynum plays down the prospect of joining William Faulkner, Ha Jin, Saul Bellow, John Updike and former Hongkonger Shirley Hazzard as winners of one of America's most prestigious literary honours. The nomination is simply a filip to her fledgling career, she says.
'I feel very honoured. It really came as a surprise to me,' she says.
Her tale is the kind of fantasy she loved reading as a child in the works of the Brothers Grimm, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens.
The dreamily carnal novel follows Madeleine's coming of age in provincial France, as she drifts in and out of a prolonged sleep. With the walls between slumber and consciousness crumbling, Madeleine toys with adulthood while joining a gypsy circus, discovering art and becoming embroiled in a love triangle. The gypsy troupe is controlled by an aristocrat who likes to watch Madeleine slap another character's buttocks. Adrien the photographer becomes a reluctant pornographer.
Bynum's prose glides in and out of this dream world, and events unfold under the surveillance of her parents and siblings, who dip her hands in a bucket of scalding lye as punishment for her sexual liaison with the town halfwit.