Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben

In the ‘middle of life’ – although this is only thirty-six – and with the unsparing eye of a portraitist, Lavinia reviews her frustrations and her solitariness, the grief and the rapture: these are her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the medieval masks of Owl, signifying winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. In attendance are dreams of rustic places and once-dear animals. But it is no ordinary procession, for her childhood comes last.

The idiosyncratic Dreaming of Dead People was first published in 1979, yet remains as surprising as ever: it is frank, mordantly funny, true to itself and raw.

Rosalind Belben was born in 1941 and spent her early childhood in rural Dorset, in the southwest of England. From the age of nine she was at boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon. Almost straight from school she went in 1959 to work for the next two years in theatre, meaning to become a writer of stage plays. That didn’t happen. Her subsequent life has been nomadic, her experience and employment varied – with sometimes, nevertheless, years on end passed in a single place.

The countryside of Dorset has been both inspiration and recurrent setting. Quite as much, ‘abroad’ has exerted a powerful draw. There have been many adored destinations. Südtirol or the Alto Adige, the German-speaking Alpine region in the north of Italy, from 1978 – or in the 1990s Tunisia, with its myriad Roman and Phoenician remains and Islamic culture. Many epiphanies.

In 1987 Belben was in West Berlin as a Fellow of the Artist in Residence Program, staying for fifteen months. New editions of Dreaming of Dead People, Is Beauty Good and Choosing Spectacles are forthcoming from And Other Stories. Among her other novels are The Limit, Hound Music and Our Horses in Egypt, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2007.