“How . . . how can I speak from my core; there is nil. I have turned thirty-six and shall never have children. I am a shrivelled person, I have sucked myself dry; I am a figure of fun; an object for curiosity; an old maid; or I shall be, old; don’t suppose I don’t mind. I do mind.”

Rosalind Belben’s decidedly original novel contemplates the distance between aloneness and loneliness. Published in 1979 it offers a more conscious version of that sub-genre of the early twentieth century, the spinster novel, a rendering that is wholly interior and includes an extended exploration of sexual frustration.

In her diary, Virginia Woolf writes, “I have entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat; of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel.” I know of no other novel that offers the reader a glimpse of the bottom of the vessel with such lucidness as Belben’s Dreaming of Dead People. It is wrapped in a particular atmosphere that conveys a sense of the existential aridity of isolation and loneliness, perhaps too familiar for some during this last terrible year.

It is a struggle to write through what Ilse Aichinger describes as the “undergrowth of banality” when thinking of such a stunningly alive yet deeply sad novel. Better perhaps to judge Belben’s nuances and pitch from an extended passage:

“I would laugh because I had come near enough to grasp that when all’s said and done – it isn’t said and done – you are beyond the point of caring about your books, or seeing the world first, or spending the rest of your money, or altering your will, or making a list of your treasures, or finding a beautiful landscape to die in, or fussing over your body and the redemption of your soul: you are flopped full length on your sofa, in your own room, gazing your last on the blur of your bookshelves – for the innocent reason that it happens to be the way you are facing; you are gone beyond the physical life; you are too near the fathomless bottom, dear nothing and nothing dear; you are not murmuring, even, howl, howl, howl, howl, howl, though you may be conscious of what is dead and what is alive. You may just write a letter to someone, sounding cheerful. No, that’s not true. Nothingness. And numbness. And blank, without either desolation or will.”