Description
A chance encounter, a road accident, an air crash, a hold-up at a bank:
How do such events connect people?
How do people see the situations from their different perspectives?
He wishes he could interpret what he feels through a better medium than the language of his thoughts. Artists can do that. And some great artists have tried to transcend the limitations of their own medium.
That’s how one of the protagonists feels about his view of reality.
Three narrative strands follow the lives of three individuals – Peter, Cathy and Ivan – through the second half of the 20th century, from post-war austerity and mediocrity in the 1950s and 1960s to the fast-moving life-style of the present decade, whereby the plot is embedded
in real events of the period. The three biographies intersect at crucial points, which reveals their internal landscapes and the different ways of understanding reality. Things are not always what they seem, and we do not always know the whole truth.
Playing with various time-levels, this novel of the mind deals primarily with potential fallacies of perception, sexual awakening, emotional exploitation and the proximity of death.
How do we store the memorable events in our lives?
And how do we cope with these memories as we grow older?
The Story Behind This Book
My Aspirations:
I hope to be able to throw some light on the difficult intricacies of human intercourse.
I want to explore the creative tension between people’s actions, their words and their thoughts.
I try to convey some of my unusual views on the way people handle their emotions, particularly in emotional power games and in sensitive contexts.
What thoughts, what emotions, what fears and joys lie behind people’s faces when they interact with each other in this day and age? How do men and women at the beginning of the twenty-first century feel about the preceding decades? And how do middle-aged people of today cope with the challenges of social mobility, global high-speed communication and the overriding power and superiority of neo-capitalism over human emotions?
My writings attempt to explore some of these issues through the medium of my novels and their uncomfortable plots.
Praise and Reviews
The story moves effortlessly from character to character, place to place and past to present. A well-chosen selection of historical events relates the protagonists' careers to what happened in the world from the 1950s to our current decade.
Professor Norbert Platz
University of Trier
An original and complex story set in England and Australia which tells of childhood and adolescence, sexual awakening and intellectual growth, adult relationships and human motivations spanning the last fifty years.
Professor Dr. Geoffrey V. Davis
University of Aachen
Chair: Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and Co-Editor: Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English
