Janet Burroway, "The Dancer from the Dance"

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children’s books, and nine novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review), Bridge of Sand and the soon-to-be-published Simone in Pieces. Her Writing Fiction, now in a tenth edition from the University of Chicago Press, is the most widely used Creative Writing text in America; and Imaginative Writing, recently published in its fifth edition, covers poetry, prose and drama. She is author of a collection of essays, Embalming Mom, poems Material Good, and the memoir Losing Tim. Winner of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council, she is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.

 

About The Dancer from the Dance, by Janet Burroway
A striking, enigmatic American girl arrives in Paris and disrupts the lives of a medical student at the Cité, a famous French mime, his protégé, the protégé’s Spanish wife, an ancient, suicidal British inventor of perpetual motion machines, a benevolent old woman, the long-suffering wife of the narrator, and the “sixty-year-old smiling public man” who tells the story. According to the narrator Stanford Powers, an acquisitions official of the UNICEF office in Paris, Prytania is one of those “fey, unfathomable creatures who float a few inches above the ground.” She seems at once helpless and quick. But which of these people are trying to help her? Which of them have fallen in love with her? Which of them may be manipulating her? And which of them are the fools?

The Dancer from the Dance is published by Michael Walmer Publishers. You can read more on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample passage from the novel. 

From The Dancer from the Dance

“The trouble is,“ he said, “That we’re stuck with the body. I hadn’t looked that far back for it before.”

“Yves would love that,“ Laura observed. “Cognac, or a sweet one?”

Bent over, he raised his head expectantly to us. Laura was crossing to the dolly of liqueurs. Elena yawned luxuriously. I hadn’t understood him. With an impatient gesture, Jean-Claude rolled forward onto his head and one forearm, hung his legs asymmetrically in the air, and wound his free arm in a crooked oval.

“Now,” he demanded very distinctly, as if his inversion might make him inaudible, “if I were to stay like this for thirty-six hours, do you think you might be able to think of me as something else than a person wrong end up?”

As he spoke his tie, a bright, deep red affair in silk shantung, slunk down his shirt front and draped itself languidly over his face. Elena sat up for the first time since dessert.

“Jean-Claude,” she said, “your taste is beyond salvation.”

Unable, anyway, to get the tie out of his eyes without altering the pattern of his arm, Jean-Claude put his legs down and sat up on the floor.

“It’s the principle of motion sculpture,” he said listlessly. “I think it is. I’ll have to ask a motion sculptor. You’re freed to see the pattern of a thing precisely because it’s doing something that it isn’t meant to do.”

“Did you buy that?” Elena insisted.

Jean-Claude tucked the tie possessively back into his jacket and gave his wife a look mock-wounded and mock-resentful. ‘I did,” he said. “But it was a sentimental purchase.”

“All right, she said, “you may wear it as much as you like at home, but I won’t be seen in company with it.” She smiled oddly. Jean-Claude took her foot and traced a ring around her ankle with his finger.