Synopsis
Larry and Eleanor had been married for four years when Larry first began studying Zen seriously. Now, two years later, Larry stands facing a mirror. He has entered into "the great doubt," a psychological impasse in his studies that threatens to rip his marriage apart. Soon, Larry's mind is overtaken by suspicion of infidelity on the part of Eleanor. Is the evidence real? Is it a hallucination brought about by his meditation? Or is this all some sort of metatheater acted out by a wife feeling her husband slip away? Whatever the case, passion inevitably transforms into suspense, and all-encompassing distrust pushes the couple toward a possibly violent climax. Author Marco Vassi was possibly the greatest erotic writer of his generation. His first publisher at Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, compared his prose to Henry Miller's. Although his life was cut short, his memory lives on here with the release of The Vassi Collection.
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About the Author
Marco Vassi was, without a doubt, the foremost erotic writer of our generation. Praised by Norman Mailer, Kate Millett, Saul Bellow, and Gore Vidal, he was not only the ultimate sexual explorer, but a literary craftsman whose own life experiences became the stuff of his fiction—expanded, of course, by a grand imagination and a full sense of the absurd.
Tragically, Vassi died from pneumonia after he had contracted AIDS.
From Publishers Weekly
For no discernible reason, except possibly the banal search for "real identity," bookstore owner Larry, the 37-year-old protagonist here, enters the life of Zen meditation with a vengeance. Obsessed by the Zen mystique, he virtually abandons all else, including his ravishing wife Eleanor, an aspiring actress. He becomes "quietistic in bed," moving from "shared eroticism into solitary meditation," and from that inert state into absolute celibacy, a condition Eleanor doesn't much care for. Suddenly evidence of her infidelity mounts and along with it Larry's jealousy. But wait: Is it fact or Zen hallucination? Does Eleanor actually leave Larry and move in with a rich mobster who can advance her theatrical career, or is it all a ruse, an exercise in theater? What was meant as enigma and mystery soon dissolves into trickery, a sequence of puzzles within puzzles. Some signs suggest that Larry will kick Zen and return to sanity and the Scrabble games of the couple's good old days. Vassi has a considerable underground reputation as an "erotic" writer established over a dozen such novels. In this one, an attempted departure from that mode, his control of a tautly told tale slips badly and ends in sheer silliness.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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