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.
Author Biography:
Gilbert Reid, television and radio writer, fluent in French and Italian, worked for 30 years in Europe. His fiction, praised by Joyce Carol Oates and others, covers a vast range - love and war, childhood and decrepitude. Here is his story I was born in Toronto, Canada, during the Second World War, women in kerchiefs, Rosie the Riveter, rationing, flags, soldiers, big bands, war talk. After the war, we moved, mother, father, and tiny me, to a farm near an itsy-bitsy Ontario village, Kleinburg. I grew up listening to the wind and the lonely sound of transcontinental trains in the far distance, staring at the vast flat western horizon, with the smell of hay, wheat, the rustling of corn, the smell too of manure, of cows, of raw, freshly plowed land, of chickens, pigs, and horses. Age five, I was dragooned with other tiny tots into a dilapidated little red schoolhouse with an outhouse for a toilet - one long board with holes in it as I remember it - one fat disheveled marvel of a schoolmarm reigning over eight snot-rag classes squished into one sweaty semi-heated room. It was glorious! Swimming holes, dogs, endless woods. I went to three different high schools as the city, like a giant amoeba spread its postwar suburban tentacles towards us. At the University of Toronto, I studied economics and political science (wanted to be a politician - was quickly disabused of that idea!). I joined the Canadian foreign service, studied at the London School of Economics - all about the money supply and interest rates and so on - and worked at the Canadian High Commission - our Embassy - in London, before heading off to be a bum - a clochard - in Paris for a year or two, study at Sciences Po, wander the streets, read Proust, Flaubert, Balzac. I worked as an economist at the OECD and suddenly earned lots of money paid to me in fistfuls of French francs. I got drunk with cash. This was Paris in the 1960s, a magical place, like Swinging London across the Channel, with Existentialists, and Beatniks, philosophers, writers, poets and chansonniers lurking everywhere, cigarettes dangling from their lips, and the war hero General Charles de Gaulle ruling over everything from the Élysée Palace like an amused, paternal, lofty father figure. All this came crashing down with the massive student revolt - and then workers' strikes - of May-June 1968. I had decamped to a rustic Jacobean thatch-roofed cottage in a tiny English village - Whittlesford - near Cambridge where I studied English literature - the cottage came equipped with friends, male and female, and a dog called Heidegger. Conveniently, the cottage was situated just a few rustic steps, down a little lane, from a disreputable but chic pub called the Tickell Arms, still a landmark. Then I lived in London for two years, Birkbeck College, pretended to do a Ph.D. - on the French novels of Samuel Beckett - I think I was suicidal to choose such a subject - angst was fashionable. I dropped out and mooched around with my very patient English girlfriend. Then, she saw an ad in the paper - and I headed off for Sicily where I ended up living for 6 years in a half-ruined ancient farmhouse, with a large walled garden on a promontory, overlooking the Strait of Messina and battered by sand-filled winds from the Sahara, and teaching English and literature at the University of Messina. This led to a gig in the film and festival business. So, I worked in Taormina, in Sorrento, in Naples, in Spoleto, and in Cine Città, Rome's glamorous film studio, toiled with stars like Marcello Mastroianni and directors like Sergio Leone. Then, I got a job as Press Officer at the Canadian Embassy, and then, after going private again - in film PR - I set up, with Elena Solari, the Canadian Cultural Center in Rome. For eleven years, that was my gig, then, in 1994, I came back to Canada and began to work for a living, doing radio, TV, and fiction.
