Some Place Quite Unknown

Celia, a teacher, writer, and mother in her fifties, undergoes psychoanalysis after nearly being killed by a passing taxi. Finding that she has bottled away years of painful memories, she obsessively engages in her work with Dr. Daniels, to whom she pours out stories and dreams about her mother who committed suicide, her relationship with various members of her extended family, and longing for her grown son who lives across the country.

Celia, a teacher, writer, and mother in her fifties, undergoes psychoanalysis after nearly being killed by a passing taxi. Finding that she has bottled away years of painful memories, she obsessively engages in her work with Dr. Daniels, to whom she pours out stories and dreams about her mother who committed suicide, her relationship with various members of her extended family, and longing for her grown son who lives across the country.

With Some Place Quite Unknown, Jane Lazarre (author of more than half a dozen memoirs and novels, including Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, and Some Kind of Innocence) explores the psychological toll of motherhood, abandonment, eroticism, and language and the failure of words.

At the heart of this novel is language: “And had not my love of words, my need for language in all its forms, always been my deepest need, almost as primal and fundamental as a young child’s need for love?” Although Celia relies on words, during her therapy sessions she uncovers and re-experiences memories that can’t be explained through words, thus her family history and her mind begin to unravel.

Some Place Quite Unknown is a story propelled by image and repetition, as opposed to your typical event-driven plot. In the first section of the book, the narrator skips from memory to memory, returning to images of the ocean, her sister’s sculpture of their mother’s uterus, and a knock-knock joke the narrator can’t get out of her head. All of these slowly weaving Celia’s past, including her familial relationships, into a cohesive tapestry. About 50 pages in, the mini-flashbacks become more infrequent and the story at last finds a steady tempo. Overall, some readers may enjoy the challenge and texture of the emotionally rich prose, but because of the slow unfolding of Celia’s character and her principle desires, namely her desire to explore her past with such rigor, some readers may be put off.

Perhaps Celia’s roundabout storytelling can be best summed up by the protagonist herself, “I have always wondered about the meaning of fiction, a way of telling stories that seems enviably comprehensible to most of the other writers I know.”

As a story within a story, this novel proves to be a fascinating study that probes the operations of the human psyche.