Author : Julieta Campos
Publisher : Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN 13 : 9781564780300
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (83 download)
Book Synopsis The Fear of Losing Eurydice by : Julieta Campos
Download or read book The Fear of Losing Eurydice written by Julieta Campos and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1994-05 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lyrical novel by one of Mexico's leading women writers explores both desire and the desire to tell a love story. In an idle moment between grading assignments, a French teacher sitting in a cafe in a Caribbean seaport town sketches an island on his white napkin. Like Proust's "petite madeleine," the island opens up a host of images: ""Island" the sum of all improbabilities; intoxicating improbability of fiction. "Island" image of desire... All the islands formulated by human beings and all islands appearing on the maps comprise a single imaginary archipelago--the archipelago of desire." Monsieur N.'s original plan to use a Jules Verne novel about shipwrecked schoolboys as a translation exercise for his pupils becomes an obsession to collect every reference to islands he can find and to meditate on them in a diary of his imaginary travels--his "Islandiary." Parallel to this quest is an archetypal love story that he begins writing in his notebook, printed in a narrow column with islands of quotations surrounding it. Voyaging and the quest for islands becomes a metaphor for the search for paradise, for the island as an imagined place where love achieves perfection. It also becomes a metaphor for writing: "Every text is an island."