OVE STORY

Cosmic love story spanning a twenty year period.

French Marxist and American Capitalist fall in love in Paris 1978. Unbenounced to him, the American girl, who is older, conceives.

The heroine heads for Spain, her baby on her breast and her daughter from a previous marriage in an old Citroen truck.

Mother and son, representing the purest form of love, experience many adventures. Beneath the surface, however, there is a thread of love which, somehow, magically, endures between the parent couple.

She writes poetry and tries to live her dream. He sails with friends to India. When he visits her on her magic island, he is like Ulysses visiting Penelope. Being parents they are abit confused, but they remain friends throughout the time.

Their separate lives combine, but on the night before her eviction from 11 years residence, the three sleep in a triangle of mattresses while the Holy Ghost breaks windows and slams doors.

Father, son and Mother laugh together at their predicument. They are knowledgeable that their time together is precious and their love impossible in the eyes of society.

JUMPING INTO THE VOID

At fifty, Lyra was an integrated foreigner in Spain. For her past eleven years , she had been renovating an old finca, a carcass of Spain´s heavy history.

As her son Mitra was in school, Lyra could open the doors of her abode to foreigners and locals alike.

Nevertheless, after eleven years of hostessing, it was time for a change. Having reached an impasse she had unwittingly painted herself into a corner. The only alternative that remained was to jump...like a symbolic death...culminating one chapter to begin another.

Lyra´s trusty son Mitra, fortunately, loved and respected his nomadic/poetic mother. She could confess and cry to this young man who, in spite of being too young to understand her predicument, was consilliatory and kind.

Afterall, true poets become suicidal at critical points in their career. Like dying stars, they often become black holes having reached the point in which they can no longer shine. They are faced with the decision: self destruct by turning inward or explode by casting off their creative material.

Lyra chose to explode, leaving almost all her earthly possessions behind to start a new chapter in her life´s story.

JUMPING. AN ANTECDOTE

Mitra, Lyra´s sixtgeen year-old son, was often her guru. He and she climbed the steep slopes of a rock island which emerged about sixty meters above the surface of the blue Mediterranean.

“I am too old to jump,” whimpered Lyra, being afraid of such a drastic change.

“That´s why you have to do it, Mummie,” retorted the little one.

As Lyra jumped, her mind cleared. When she felt the cool water slap her feet, she kenw that she had survived.

Her symbolic act had given her the courage to continue her life after the crushing blow of social defeat.

At the very least, Lyra was determined to not reach her own level of incompetence.

Life went on .

Miss Temple says in JANE EYRE by Emily Bronte:

Intelligence and a proper education will give you independence of spirit and that is the greatest blessing of all.

The only thing that matters in your life is to be in harmony with God.

ON STARTING AS NOVEL

I suppose the first thing to do when starting a novel is to sit down with a big mug of coffee, cigarettes, something – perhaps illegal – to help you think, and get on with it.

As luck would have it, coffee made me sick, I was unable to smoke at the time and didn´t have the money to buy anything illegal.

So...that left me alone in a small dark room with an antique typewriter.

It was as good a time as any...love had splashed its energizing light on the writer...the lamp was lit , but the pain was strong...no better way than to turn it around.

PARIS, 1978

A SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

A poetic love story in an historical context, spanning three countries and two decades in Europe, roughly 1970-1990.

Based on my life from leaving a secure nest in Paris where I had been a wife, restaurant owner and eventually a photo-journalist with the French press, to falling in love and giving birth to a child without marrying, finally moving to a semi-desert island in the Mediterranean where I could breast feed while writing and photographing the inspiring beauty of my surroundings.

The story line follows a cosmic love story to a final showdown in an abandoned finca which, at various times in history, had been the seat of the three major Mediterranean religions: Catholicism, Judaism and Islam.

All present day themes are covered: cosmic spiritual love, carnal love, motherly love...in an intertwining story of real and yet, by nature, impossible loves set against the backdrop of historical and political Spain, France and England.

Dana Holland WRIGHT

Geneva 2006