THE ETERNAL RETURN is the story of failed writer “Lucky” and his voyage back to childhood, to his unrealized dreams, and to the nightmares he has kept hidden from himself and others. After a jobless, loveless, and friendless decade in California, Lucky returns to New York in an attempt to finally finish the novel he has been pretending to work on for years. His plans are interrupted when he befriends an uncanny woman named Betty who progressively starts to resemble the heroine in his unfinished novel. As the mystery of Betty’s existence begins to unravel, Lucky is forced to confront his past and decide what is real and what is illusion.
A sinister reimagining of the Pygmalion legend – alternately monstrous, cynical, and comedic – it is a book that follows W.B. Yeats’ dictum that “sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.”
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Nothing that exists is absolutely worthy of our love, so we must love what does not exist. But this object of love which does not exist is not a fiction. Our fictions cannot be more worthy of love than we who are not.
– Simone Weil
THE ETERNAL RETURN. Chapter One Excerpt.
THE SITTER
Before any of the following happened I strongly believed that autobiographies were for the most part worthless unless one had lived through exceptional times or was oneself an exceptional individual. I can’t claim either. That percentage among us is infinitesimal. Most of our lives, I had come to feel, are utterly pedestrian no matter how alternately “touching” or “tragic” or “funny” they may seem to us, no matter how unique we think we are or were.
For each individual who has survived war, famine, the Holocaust, gulags, or grotesque personal misfortune, there are millions who experienced the same fate but lacked the skill, the ambition and, most importantly, the vanity to actually put pen to paper. And so vanity and a little bit of skill combined to show us the experiences of only a few. Mankind, I firmly believed, was not even the proverbial anthill, but something more akin to a parasitic, self-reproducing fungus, spewing out replacements for ridiculously short lives in an almost sadomasochistic manner; one would need to set the bar rather high to warrant writing about oneself.
After the following happened, I changed my mind and decided that whatever I wrote would be worthwhile after all; for posterity perhaps, or at the very least as a case study for clinicians. Although the rationale for existence continued to pose a logical problem, I eventually got my mental illness under relative control, and so I broke the promise I made to myself to never compose an autobiography. So call this what you will: autobiography, confession, case study.
Books
Next Year in Jerusalem
A brutal re-imagining of the Gospel story, Next Year in Jerusalem follows the footsteps of Yeshua Bar-Yosif—an illiterate, epileptic, bastard son of a Roman soldier on his ill-fated life journey through a land racked by terror.
The Man in the Brown Suit
A mnemonic journey in verse through place and time – from New York to California, interspersed with flashbacks of Russia – as related in a conversation with a demon who appears as the “Man in the Brown Suit” on the East Coast and who reinvents himself as the “Man in the Seersucker Suit” on the Pacific.
Haymarket Square
A novel in verse and a re-imagining of Alfred Doblin‘s monumental “Berlin Alexanderplatz“, re-set in post Soviet Russia which concerns the fate of Alex Bobrov: a petty criminal and former pimp who was imprisoned for ‘accidentally’ murdering one of his tricks. Having served out his entire sentence without witnessing the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent radical transformation of society in the fledgling Russian Federation, Alex desperately seeks to fit in this new world he exited out onto.