Mar Egeo

In Mar Egeo, a man leaves his wife and stepchildren to catch a freighter to Spain. A village council in T'ang era China selects a bright young man to go to the largest city in the Empire to study how it administers its citizens. A young woman dying of leukemia meets a man on a plane and begins an impossible relationship. Using memoir, fiction and journals, Jim Levy tells about his travels and adventures in vivid, sensual prose. At age twenty he wanders in Italy and Spain. Ten years later he catches malaria in Ghana and witnesses torture in Ethiopia. Over ten days in France, he visits his sister, whose marriage is ending just as he is beginning a life-long love. The book ends with journal entries from trips to Belize, Greece, France, and Baja, Patzcuaro and Guanajuato in Mexico. "Suddenly I realized where I was, in a hash house (the opium was being smoked upstairs), in a room full of stoned Arabs. The boy who'd given me the hash said he was leaving, could I after all give him something. I had no change and gave him the smallest bill I had - saw the look of disgust pass over the Frenchman's face - I'd paid too much." "I move through the world lost but navigating like crazy. "Yes," says Harvey, "navigating by women." He is right; I must find a better way, if I am to return home. And what is home? A familiar bed? A wife? A dog? Every hotel, cabin, floor and field is a home of sorts. Look up; there are sun-torn clouds. There is the sun itself, hydrogen fire. These are home, and I am always home."