Kim Echlin - Dagmars Daughter

Praise for Dagmars Daughter

Dagmars Daughter is an unusual novel of singular beauty, which seeks to reinforce in us a sense of the monumental and miraculous in everyday events.

The Globe and Mail

An accomplished work with compelling and unusual imagery, lively prose, bizarre fact, as well as the confidence of a world completely known and rendered.

The Gazette (Montreal)

As she did in her first novel, Elephant Winter, Echlin writes with a fluent sensual vocabulary, layering images like a musician building to the perfect chord.

National Post

Hauntingly beautiful Dagmars Daughter is a mesmerizing dance that encourages the reader to leap into a mystical Celtic cauldron where regular people seem enlivened with supernatural passions and extraordinary powers.

Calgary Herald

Dagmars Daughter is an enchanted tale.

Books in Canada

At times, Dagmars Daughter feels as much an epic poem as a novel. Echlin uses old forms of storytelling, blending myth and lyrical language to translate music into words. So much beautiful language and fantastic imagery when the narrative picks up speed, drawing readers into the strange world of Millstone Nether, the power of the story takes hold and doesnt let go.

Quill & Quire

Kim Echlin creates sentences beyond our imagining this is an exquisite novel.

Literary Review of Canada

Although this story is captivating, it is the writing that dazzles as it echoes the wild weather and wild emotions.

The Hamilton Examiner

PENGUIN CANADA

DAGMARS DAUGHTER

KIM ECHLIN has been a documentary filmmaker, editor, and teacher. She has worked and travelled in Europe, China, the Marshall Islands, Africa, and Cambodia, and has completed a doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling. She currently writes and teaches in Toronto. Her first novel, Elephant Winter , won the Torgi Talking Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel is The Disappeared , a love story set against the backdrop of the Pol Pot era.

Also by Kim Echlin

Elephant Winter

Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer

The Disappeared

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2001
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2002
Published in this edition, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Kim A. Echlin, 2001
Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6
All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without
the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the
product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN: 978-0-14-317059-4

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data
available upon request to the publisher.

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see
www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

for

Olivia and Sara

a cognizant original v5 release october 08 2010

From the Great Above she opened her ear

to the Great Below.

From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear

to the Great Below.

From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear

to the Great Below.

Inanna abandoned heaven and earth

to descend to the underworld.

The Descent of Inanna

Sumerian story, 2000 B.C.

There is geometry in the humming of the strings.

There is music in the spacings of the spheres.

Study the monochord.

Pythagoras

T here. In the darkness a bony girl. She ties an oilskin pouch close to her waist and hides it under salvaged blue homespun. Her breasts leak milk and swell with pain. She dreams of cutting them off. The rest of her is hunched and thin. The skin under her eyes is smudged. She prepares to disappear into the hold of a ship heading down the coast to the gulf. She hides under a seine-gallows hung with newly barked nets. The sea crashes against the shore with neither joy nor remorse. Mens skulls down there. Poisoned fish. Torn and tangled nets of bad springs. The girl will stow away in the home boats stale hold behind barrels of instruments. Now she waits.

Her name is Moll, though she was never baptized. The woman she called mother went silent before she was born. Her father was known as a fisherman, arms powerful as a machine. He sailed the great trawlers that swept the sea clean of fish. When he came back, men looked for him, asking, Wheres buddy? They wanted spruce beer from his root cellar. They were his friends. When he got drunk he fought them and went to his daughters bed.

Moll bore a blue baby, hardly knowing what was happening to her. She took it and tied it to a stone and dropped it into the sea. She was long-limbed and taller than any man in her village, too skeletal to show what everyone knew and didnt speak. She couldnt read. She signed herself into the world with drops of pee in a hole in the woods. This is her truth unconcealed. Even this will darken.

With the girl in its maw, the boat left the Labrador shore for the gulf. She took her fathers eyestone and wore it in the oilskin pouch against her bottom rib. He would not notice it was gone until a summer and a fall and a winter had passed, and when he found out he cursed nature. By then Moll no longer feared death, for death and dying are the very life of the darkness.