Frustrated Artists
Significantly or not, Vance portrays each of his human criminal 'princes' (the humanoid alien Attel Malagate is the exception) as a frustrated artist, each working out his fantasies in a different medium. Much of The Book of Dreams centres on Treesong's attempt to retrieve his own youthful work of fantastic fiction (itself called The Book of Dreams): the portions reproduced in the novel could have come from one of Vance's own magical novellas. To some extent Treesong is prefigured in the repulsive yet almost pitiable protagonist of Vance's thriller Bad Ronald (1973).
Read more about this topic: Demon Princes
Famous quotes containing the words frustrated and/or artists:
“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)