BOOKS

Trapped in a world of mental representations, the narrating protagonist feels eerily detached from objective reality. The symbols have completely consumed him, so much that a simple dip in the Pacific Ocean becomes a mockery, a simulacrum of contact with water, laden with the absurdity of present awareness.

Estranged from society, and spiteful of those who have taken refuge in the common-sense life he calls “the footnote,” the protagonist escapes Los Angeles. He sails his boat to Catalina to reintegrate with the natural world, away from Venice Beach’s noise and graffiti. In Catalina he reflects on death, solipsism, other minds, love, communication, and family. All the while the time nears for his most consequential meeting with the girl.

A boarding school boy and a faraway girl exchange what HE believes are love letters. What happens when the two finally meet? Touch? Is their love real, or are they living separate dreams? Each character in this philosophical novel is infatuated with something far away, either in space or time. Yet that won’t stop them from grasping for the ungraspable, like Windsor (the teenaged jazz musician) who falls in love with a girl on a screen, only to discover that the film was made fifty-five years ago, and Aurelia Campo must be…about seventy years old. Windsor knocks. She opens the door.

Stories about love and the individual.

A love triangle on a small sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

After attending Astronaut School, a boy travels to outer space to discover the most wonderful thing in the universe.