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 you can forget who and what you were, and what your life might have been.
Author Biography:
Life is chaos. To begin at the beginning or at the end? Hmm? I'll begin at the beginning. 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 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 Science Po, wander the streets, read Proust, Flaubert, Balzac. Then 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 by this time 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 living with my very patient English girlfriend. Then, she saw an ad in the paper - and, after a flurry of exchanged telegrams, I headed off on a series of trains 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 city of Messina and 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, again serendipitously, I got a job as Press Officer at the Canadian Embassy, and then, after going private again - in film PR - I set up, with my colleague 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.
