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. In fragments and vignettes, Ava's life unfolds in a spectacular dream theater, populated by the familial ghosts of all her life's loves. We hear the voices of her three former husbands: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. The voices of the literary loves that shaped her life: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Wittig, Lorca, Frisch. 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 Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Ava's voice.