Persephone Greenstreet emerges from darkness into light and finds herself sitting on a bus stop bench. Puzzled by her predicament, she attempts to rediscover the mystery behind her lack of memory and her bewildering reappearance into the conscious world. Is she the victim of amnesia or has she been kidnapped by felons of the underworld? Through her adventures, Persephone faces the drama that exists in the regions between illusion and reality, dream and awakening.

 

In this delightful and bizarre novella, Patricia Jean Smith weaves elements of classical mythology with the experimental telling of a contemporary story of detection. Throughout this black comedy, a woman who is a trained scientist clings to the logic of her paternalistic culture. Ironically, the betrayal of this disconnected rationality forces her back into herself; back into the certitude of her own sensual experience. Double Bind exists in the unresolved realm between “damned if you do” and “damned if you don’t.”  A novella of intriguing paradoxes, Double Bind mirrors the dilemma faced by women in the last decade of the 20th century.

 

• Publisher: Sono Nis Press (1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1550390198
• ISBN-13: 978-1550390193
• Keywords: novella, Canadian