“This novel merges myth and reality, evoking fairy tales, Greek myth and archetypal dreams and desires, yet holding one in a real and realized world. It is a very powerfully written and sensual book which confronts the ‘caring of’ and ‘cared for’ in the feminine, both of oneself and the other.”—Lawrence Scott, author of Alred’s Sin, winner of A Commonwealth Writer’s Prize

“This is a wonderfully unsettling novel, constructed around a progression of haunting, tableau-like images which have the authority of received myth while surprising us with their inventiveness.”—Glenn Storhaug, poet and publisher

“Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men aware of danger.
Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding, like ice about to melt.”
- Tao Te Ching

Yielding Ice About to Melt awakens the reader to new, hidden, and forgotten perceptions. Using a prose that is pure yet intense, Richard Penna creates an enigmatic world that is at once in and yet out of our time, nudging our memory of ancient truths and shaking us into awareness of new beginnings. Thomas, a young doctor we know only by his first name, has crossed a vast and heavily polluted river in order to live in a sparsely populated area on the edge of an impenetrable forest. An icy winter freezes the land and the river. He has found work as a factotum in a remote house inhabited entirely by women. Among them are Frieda and Maria, elderly twin sisters; Genia, an abandoned child; Christina, a blind sculptor; and Rebecca, a sick woman confined to her room. Each woman, in her particular way, holds Thomas in thrall. He is bound to them all and his feelings for them range between a passionate, unexpressed love and a profound hatred. His refusal to accept their real and symbolic significance in his life leads him further into a state of alienation and impotent rage. A crisis occurs, a disappearance, and a death. Thomas realizes he must yield, “like ice about to melt,” to the guidance of the women—emotionally, psychologically, sexually—but how is he to do this? How can he shed his own alien guise to find a vital part of his new being?

Belonging to a long tradition of symbolic and transcendent literature, from medieval mystery plays to Hawthorne to Maurice Blanchot, this cryptic novel slowly unravels the mystery of the feminine and the exploration of the female, and the way in which we seek to ignore its inspiration by creating alien and distorted forms.

Richard Penna was born in Cornwall in the UK. He has lived and traveled in Greece and now lives in the south of France where he is for the moment able to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1999 he published the prose-poetry text entitled One Man. This is his first novel.

2003, 5½ x 8½,
192 pages (Dufour Editions)
ISBN 0-8023-1339-6 Paper $14.95