Tales I Told My Mother

"Would it surprise you to learn that ACATELECTIC means not catalectic. . . . But ACATALEPTIC. . . . means relation to acatalepsy, incomprehensibility. . . . And ACATAPHASIA, master, ACATAPHASIA is the lack of power to express connected thought. . . ." Long before this arcane teminology is reached, the qualities defined - incomprehensibility and a lack of power to express connected thought - have been as self-defeating as they were in Mr. Nye's earlier novel, Doubtfire (1968). Under the spell of Joyce perhaps - he's a lyricist (and a poet) and a lexicographer and words, words, words (gimmal and goffered and ruddle) arrest the eye while making no further inroads on the mind. The stories he acknowledges have their origins in dreams but also, as indicated by smattering referrals throughout, in legend and literature. "Howell" features, along with everything else, a liar and practical joker and outsized Munchhausen who purveyed pornography to Swinburne; the eponymous "Miss Eponym" is a dying authority on Emily Bronte and an earlier story has its antecedence in Patrick Branwell Bronte's Kingdom of Angria. Only one seems reasonably straightforward the gentle "Axel." And underneath the luxuriant crabgrass of the imagination, dark fancies, primal symbols???? (Kirkus Reviews)