This beautifully written and bold novel recreates the troubled inner life of James Joyce's mentally
ill daughter, Lucia. Falling somewhere between the novels of Celine and Jean Rhys, Clairvoyant
combines merriment with misery, the real with the unreal, and plunges the reader into a labyrinth
of strange yet exhilarating imagination. James Joyce, unlike his wife, refused to believe his
daughter was truly mentally ill. Instead, he thought she was clairvoyant--a genius with
supernatural qualities.
Alison Leslie Gold has recreated the tortured imaginated life of this forgotten woman. By turns
engrossing and compelling, Clairvoyant not only sheds new light on one of world literature's most
towering figures, it also lets us into the mind—and heart—of a woman whose life has been
overshadowed by that brilliant, but far from perfect, literary artist.
Drawn from factual details of the Joyce family and their contemporaries—which include Carl Jung
and Samuel Beckett—and through a mixture of memory, dream and hallucination, Clairvoyant is
a stirring tribute to Lucia's abiltiy to survive in the face of a most mysterious and terrible illness.
Excerpt:
On the rolling lawn of Barnaderg Bay Hospital, the long-term patient known as Miss Lucia
Joyce sat in a position of slack repose, in a patch of weak sunlight. Her left wrist was braceleted
by a canvas posy, the right by a loose cloth only. Her eyes were shut though the left lid fluttered
ever so slightly. Her wavy gingerbread-and-gray hair looked as though it had recently been
permed. On her lap lay a small copybook and the stub of a wooden pencil.
A mockingbird trilled from its position on the lower branches of a nearby elm tree. In entre
chat six the bird leaped into the air, somersaulted, landed on a branch, and then resumed its
trilling as it had been doing in tandem to the somersaulting all afternoon a short distance from
Miss Joyce’s chair.
The faint sun passed behind a cloud, washing a pale shadow across her face. Her right hand
jerked against the restraint and lazily she opened both yes. They were so blue and clear—her
mother’s eyes she had always been told—that they could almost be regarded as aquamarine.
Large drops of rain plopped against the crown of her head.
For a brief moment of ecstasy she smelled the rain-drenched, fresh smell of her mother’s wet
hair. She waited to hear the tone of her voice. By whether or not it was sharp she would know if
her mother had finally forgiven her for being such a disappointment.
