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?
Praise and Reviews
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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
Rudolph Bader was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1948. At university he read English and German literatures and linguistics as well as Islamic studies and near eastern languages. More...
