AVA

Ava Klein thirty-nine lover of life world traveler professor of comparative literature is dying. From her hospital bed on this her last day on earth she makes one final ecstatic voyage. People places offhand memories and imaginary things drift in and out of Avas consciousness and weave their way through the narrative. The voices of her three former husbands emerge: Francesco a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole lost in the air over France; Carlos a teenager from Granada. The ways people she loved expressed themselves in letters or at the beach or at the moment of desire return to her. There is Danilo her current lover a Czech novelist and others lovers of one night as she sings the endless joyous erotic song cycles of her life because "Dusk and the moment right before shapes are taken back is erotic. And the dark." The voices of her literary loves as well are woven into the narrative: Woolf Eliot Nabokov Beckett Sarraute Lorca Frisch among others. These writers comment on and help guide us through the text. We hear the voices of her parents who survived the Treblinka death camp and of her Aunt Sophie who did not. War permeates the text for on Ava Kleins last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Avas voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure of astonishment the voice of regret the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence." "AVA" is an attempt in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates." The fragments of the novel are combined to make a new kind of wholeness allowing environments states of mind and rhythms not ordinarily associated with fiction to emerge. "AVA"s theme is the poignancy of mortality the extraordinary desire to live the inevitability of death--the things never done never understood the things never said or said right or said enough. Ava yearns and the reader yearns with her struggling to hold on to all that slips away.