Bøger af Gilbert Reid

In nine dramatic, vividly etched stories, SO THIS IS LOVE explores love and hate, the tangle of fascination, perversity, ambivalence, and power at the heart of intimacy. In "Pavilion 24," set in the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s, a Muslim militiaman, his leg amputated above the knee, finds himself lying, helpless, next to his deadly enemy, a beautiful young Serb, her warm body pressed against his. The girl is blind; without him, she will die; without her, he will die. Blindness returns - metaphorically - in "Soon We will be Blind." Sitting in the dark on the porch of a sprawling farmhouse on a hot rainy summer night, drinking beer with her father, a young woman is swept back to the distant past, to a childhood rape. She remembers, too, how, in that same summer, she met the most unique and beautiful person ever to enter her life. In "After the Rain," it is April in Paris, in the 60s or 70s. A jaded diplomat, who is with the woman he truly loves, decides to have sex - out of curiosity or just for the hell of it - with an exotic and beautifully fragile golden-skinned girl. Can he defy the gods? In "Irony is ..." a cynical professor of literature is marooned on an isolated beach on a volcanic island, with an alluring, androgynous French literary theorist. As she weaves her intricate cerebral spell, he finds himself playing a starring role in her perverse erotic theatre. But, is he a star, or merely an extra, merely part of the décor? "Hey, Mister!" plunges us into a bloody civil war in Africa. Can a daring, white photo-journalist, famous for her exclusives on human suffering, pluck one small boy - amid millions - from certain death and bring him home to a new life in Paris? "The Champion" sweeps us into the twilight of the Italian dolce vita. A cynical white writer and his exquisitely beautiful offbeat young black friend search the beaches of the Mediterranean coast, looking for a violent deadbeat, a man once nicknamed "the champion." With disabused cynical eyes, the duo delves the depths of toxic love and sexual addiction. In "Lollipop," among flirtations and bottles of wine, a voluptuous young woman, her mind frozen in the past after an automobile accident and with a scarred, half-shattered face, bets she can learn the lyrics of "Lollipop." When she fails, she walks naked into the sea, a wounded goddess disappearing into a blaze of wintery sunlight. In "Bevete del Vino," set in Rome's Left Bank, Trastevere, a world-weary 50-year-old international civil servant in his fifties finds himself sharing his life with a young Englishwoman who reads Kant and Wittgenstein in bed. She, he realizes, is infinitely more mature and subtle than he. In "The Road out of Town" what was once a real farm village has become a tinsel-like facade, a tourist attraction, surrounded by endless featureless suburbs, a stage set where everything is false and everyone a stranger. It is to this Ontario village that an economist who has long lived in Paris, returns. Seeing the village as it has now become, he remembers the village as it was. He is swept into his own childhood. Suddenly, in the luminous world of memory, he realizes what it was - the world that has been lost, the life he never lived, the person he never became. And, at the core of this life-long betrayal and forgetfulness, he remembers too, who she was, the most beautiful, tender, fragile, brave girl he ever knew. Yes, it was love. But he didn't know it at the time. Only now does he realize ... It is strange, he thinks, how easily

LAVA AND OTHER STORIES anatomizes desire, death, and fracturing sexual identities. In the first section of the book, La Dolce Vita, the title story "Lava" ushers us into a sultry night of sex, nihilism, and transcendence. It is the eve of a prestigious film festival in Taormina, an ancient Sicilian hilltop seaside town, a renowned sexual and gay paradise, once frequented by Nietzsche, Goethe, and D H. Lawrence. Etna erupts. In the smoky Sicilian night, a 10-mile-long string of lava glows like an insidious worm. A drunk journalist, spiraling towards nihilistic self-annihilation, argues Zen metaphysics with an 11-year-old girl - she is life, hope, the temptation of redemption. A blond French film star plunges into shamanistic sexual abandon. A renowned aging gay playwright pirouettes his jaded cynicism before a handsome young man. "You are a worm, an embryo, nothing more!" The young man shatters into a firestorm of sexualities, a polymorphous vortex, a tapestry of lust. An adulterous couple pushes passion to its limits, flirting with the end of their affair. In "That was the Summer That" sex spins like a merry-go-round: a group of young women spends a steamy Roman summer trading sex partners like baubles, while around them terrorists murder, maim, and kidnap. In "Hi, I'm back!" a jaded screenwriter returns to a Roman beach, remembers a beautiful woman, a failed love affair, and an idyllic winter in an isolated farmhouse on a sleepy canal between Rome and the sea. Glimpsing a stranger in the twilight, he wonders if he can reignite the passions of yesteryear. The second section of the book, Shattered, tells of broken lives, emptied out human shells, the husks left behind. In "It must have been the Rain," the childlike hulking inmate of an insane asylum, who has no idea a fellow inmate loves him, catches a glimpse of the toxic murderous man he once was. In "A Universe of Smiles," a cynical Hollywood producer - a virtuoso of charm - relives the moment he shattered the love of his life. Now, he yearns for a new, impossible love. In "What Time is it on the Moon," a man sits with his son in a cafe at twilight. There is nothing to say. It is impossible to communicate with a child. Having lost the child he once was, this father has lost himself; when you lose yourself, you lose everyone else too. In "Blossoms" a paralyzed, dying man observes a woman drinking coffee on a rooftop terrace. Dreaming of the rich sensuality of life, he weaves fantasies around the unknown woman who has no idea he exists. In "Now We Dance" a young girl confronts the death of her friend, the daughter of the man her mother was about to marry: What is left when the living person is gone? In "Like an Angel," a young man - a powerful bomb in his backpack - boards a rural commuter train in the English countryside and gazes at the passengers as the train hurdles towards the climactic moment which will occur in a tunnel - where, as the imam explained, the blast will be total, there will be no survivors. In the final story, "I Hate Hats," the narrator reflects on the tragic destiny which will one day overtake him. One day, like his father, he will be bald, and "not have a curl to his name." Life is tragic. There are so many ways to fail at that continuous unending exam which is life - so many ways to fail to fully live - and many of them are cataloged in Lava and Other Stories.