"...stylish, if opaque, noir."
-Kirkus Reviews
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Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 4
date: May 30, 2009
The fourth of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.
Marie Redonnet’s Forever Valley (trans. Jordan Stump) hit me like a ton of bricks when I first came across it. Part of what Redonnet calls a triptych, rather than a trilogy, Forever Valley stands alongside Hotel Splendid and Rose Mellie Rose just outside of time, just outside of place. In Forever Valley, the young female narrator, who lives alone with an aging minister in a valley that is going to be flooded, spends her free time digging holes to try and find the cemetery that long since erased any trace of itself. That all she ever manages to uncover is ooze is terribly a propos in the watery universe of the triptych. The narrator’s preferred pastime puts me in mind of the instruction that my friend the writer Selah Saterstrom received many a time in her youth (and which I borrowed in my novel The Exquisite ) to go out into the yard and “dig for the devil.” In Ray of the Star Harry Tichborne does his own variety of digging in a city that is not quite Barcelona and a time that is not quite now and is both surprised and not surprised by what he digs up.
