The Song of Stork and Dromedary
Daanje writes with intimacy about sisterly love, relationships both real and imagined, and death in her episodic work, weaving and interweaving numerous connections which inevitably circle back to Eliza May Drayden and her vilified novel, Haeger Mass. Eliza dies on December 12, 1847, and thus is Daanje’s extraordinary yet mournful tribute to Emily Brontë born.
In 19th-century Bridge Fowling, Yorkshire, Eliza is one of five daughters of Parson Drayden. Two are lost to early death, leaving Millicent, Eliza, and a very young Helen, who is the first of the remaining three to die. The organic nucleus of Daanje’s work is Eliza, and the manifestation of her alters with time as she is worshipped, maligned, and reinvented through myth and fabrication, keeping alive the notion that she has cheated death. Millicent is left to nurse and then bury her. Using odd gothic invention and a vivid imagination, Daanje portrays the uncertainty of human existence through letters, academic notes, and Eliza’s 19th-century biographer’s research and observations. Interrelationships become more tangential the further we venture towards the heart of the novel.
We can make sense of the whole and its parts through interludes, where we reflect on a range of subjects—spinster sisters, dependent sisters, star-crossed lovers, marriage proposals, funeral workers, secret burials, and imaginary love affairs. The obsessions with death and decay bend the truth around mortality and reincarnate the dead in memory, often misunderstanding and maligning their original being and intent. Daanje creates similar situations in the 19th and 20th centuries to expand on wider theoretical and theological arguments in which this challenging novel in translation asks some of the most fundamental questions which have plagued mankind since the beginning of time. Her careful pace lends the narrative an unstoppable momentum filled with awe-inspiring creativity and beauty.
