The first and most unforgettable character in Ducornet’s stories is the language itself. Not only are the narrating voices wildly various-- in this collection stories are told by a dog, by a child in an asylum, and by a Jew-hating antequarian spinster, among others. But the sensual specificity of the writing is extraordinary, especially in the lists that celebrate naming and in the flamboyant analogies that determinedly connect the animal and the human worlds, which articulate the heady odor, the sound, and the vivid taste of things. Reading her work, our senses are torqued to an exquisite sensitivity. We are tempted to imagine tasting “cakes as yellow as pollen, preserved apricots, buffalo cream thick and sweetened with Syrian honey.” In a whiff of a woman’s urine, we catch “the smoky fragrance of Lapsang souchong.” We hear a man grinding his teeth in his sleep so loudly his wife “nightly dreamed of industry: gravel pits, cement factories, brickworks.” For those of us etiolated by a black and white technical and industrial world, Ducornet’s prose is Oz. We are carted along into exotic scenarios in Egypt, India, Iran, Algeria, France, and Italy by her language-of-a-different-color. When Charles, a boorish landowner in “Das Wunderbuch,” introduces himself to a local girl at a dance, admitting that he owns the local hill of trees, “she-- who had that day seen them in the spring light blooming like a sea of foam-- looked at him with interest. ’You could raise bees!’ she told him. ’All that nectar! All that pollen!’” The Ducornet characters we admire are always in love with the world.

      But for many of Ducornet’s characters, cut off from their desires, the rich promises of the world swirl around them like the temptations of St. Jerome. They themselves are trapped in spiritual-- which is to say sensorial-- deserts. Such is the case in “Das Wunderbuch.” We sympathize with the main character, Annie, who has fatally married such a man as would mistake her delight at the sight of a toad on a garden path and crush it with his heel. Her deadened domestic life contrasts so sharply with the life of her imagination, stimulated by a book of wonders, that she ends up cutting her wrists in the forest. Vertige Dore, too, in the story bearing his name for a title, finds that his own family “seemed insipid ever after” he has seen a picture of the four-armed, bare-breasted Sri Lakshmi in a book on his father’s desk. Both Gertrude, in “Neurosis of Containment,” denying her sexual longing and living with Puritan self-righteousness in a room full of dolls, and Guillermo, a priest who “fullfills his duties without interest, thinking to live out his life in obscurity and morbid dullness,” come face to face with their pent-up desires and turn away in fear and guiltiness.

      Nor is the struggle with desire one that is reserved for adults. In a world where parents repress their sexual appetites in habits of sadism and brutality, the cruelest fates are endured by children whose nascent erotic and imaginal longings seem to bring on nightmarish retributions. Redolant throughout these stories is the myth of Saturn, the god who swallowed his own progeny until one, Jupiter, survived to overthrow him. Introduced in the very first tale, “The Chess Set of Ivory,” Jupiter is one of the Roman gods the young speaker’s father is having carved into a chess piece to battle the chess pieces of Egyptian gods. But immediately after seeing the carver’s finished Jupiter, the father grows sick, bumping “into a table piled high with several dozen skinned heads of sheep”; he falls to his knees in the street, vomiting. Meanwhile, the speaker of the story, a girl just awakening to sexual pleasure, is fascinated at an antique store by a figure of Horus, god of the rising sun. This hawk-headed god speaks to her, she tell us, “with such urgency that, for the first time in my young life, I had dared ask my father that he buy it.” When her father does finally inquire about the Horus figure, he is shown instead “a blackened piece of mummy,” a bad omen which seems to presage his wife’s betrayal of him. It is as though by some strange, guilty illogic, the child’s budding desire leads to the collapse of her family.

      But it gets worse for the little ones. The precociously sensitive boy of “Roseveine” is driven mad by his father’s sadistic stories about torturing and cooking turtles. In keeping with the Saturn myth, the boy is afraid his father will eat him like a turtle. And the boy’s demented tutor threatens the boy, exacerbating his fears, telling him that the father indeed will “boil [him] like a soup bone.” In “The Student from Algiers,” the love-smitten protagonist wanders through a country torn by political upheaval and insurrection while “The sky moves around her like a great mouth; she is held in the mouth of the sky and expects to be swallowed whole.” Again, in “The Foxed Mirror,” a boy forced to kiss a glass coffin containing a splayed figure of Christ, a boy for whom “Ever after the world will seem flat and colorless,” is reawakened by a gypsy artist painting a triptych in which Saturn sits “on a throne of lucid bones. In one hand he holds the scythe with which he emasculated his father, Uranus; in the other he holds his infant son whom he is about to devour.” When the explicit horror of that painted scene recurs in “Opium” in an image of the Pope launching the murderous crusades and carving up a Europe that “stinks of burning flesh,” one cannot help but see this Pope, too, as another version of Saturn, the child-eater.

      There are other motifs connecting the tales as well. We are told in the first story of Osiris whose dismembered body Isis recovered piece by piece “until she found every part but the phallus.” This missing phallus literally pops up in the next story “Wormwood” and again in a mural in “The Many Tenses of Waiting,” this time “ejaculating sperm in the shape of leaves and flowers.” Likewise, images of sparks emblematize moments of vision in “Wormwood,” in “Fortune,” and in the title story.

      But what prepares us for the most significant moments in Ducornet’s stories are the structural elements themselves. We are alerted to emotional transformations when, for instance, a speaker’s custom of referring to himself in the royal “we” shifts to self-reference as “one.” Or when the verb tense of a story slides from present to past and back to present. Or when, plot and story seemingly complete, Ducornet adds a coda, a supplemental paragraph that she fastens to the story like a wide, long-distance lens through which our vision of the narrative is magnified and deepened.

      In a way, all of the stories are like lenses (and ear trumpets) through which we see the various incarnations and overhear the numerous voices of desire. But in the last, the title story, Ducornet plays her trump card. In “The Word ’Desire,’” Ducornet’s most autobiographical character undergoes a revelation of multiplicity. She feels herself as others. In an act of transformative empathy that transcends jealousy and guilt, Ducornet’s unnamed character experiences both the desire of her lover and the desire of another woman who is the momentary object of her lover’s gaze. The insight she gains from this experience, a glimpse of desire’s ephemerality, “fans the pleasure she shares with” her lover. Ducornet dispenses with the multiple characters of her other stories who each enact limited aspects of desire. The protagonist of the title story crosses the threshold of singularity. Once again like Whitman, Ducornet’s unnamed woman comes to realize that she contains multitudes. She submits herself to a mystery by which, without sacrificing her individuality, she puts on “the infinite faces of desire.”

      “The Word ’Desire’” is a kind of metafiction, finally, of authorship and the mystery of imagination. The most exotic landscape in Ducornet’s stories is revealed to be the self, the self as a construction of experience and meanings which are-- Ducornet reminds us-- always mediated through language. We come to know ourselves only through moments that force us to deal with the whole scope and vocabulary of our desire. As one of Ducornet’s character asserts, “There is no illumination without vertigo.” A flirting glance can instigate a boy’s drowning. Those who submit to authority will have their necks snapped. Desire, Ducornet insists, can be dark and dangerous as a cottonmouth, and the promise of the world is always swallowing its own tail.

      Oh readers, you who allow yourselves into the deviant space of Ducornet’s prose will quickly find her language undoing you, loosening your hair, worrying the buttons of your shirt, caressing you with its many expert hands. And like Gertrude, in “Neurosis of Containment,” you will invariably feel “a compelling ease of spirit, a vibrancy, a fluidity” that takes you by surprise. And when you realize too late the danger you are in, you will thank me for warning you to succumb to it. Elsewise, there is only the familiar. But you already know that.