Erich Wolfgang Skwara

The Austrian architect, Sebastian Winter, flies to San Diego from Vienna to attend a conference, filled with apprehension about returning to the city where he had once lived, until the love of his life, Claudia, without warning, stepped out of their car and out of his life, never to return. At the final banquet Winter is seized by the fear that his wife could suddenly appear among the guests. He gets drunk and in driving home kills a pedestrian and is arrested. While in jail awaiting bail from Vienna, he relives the past that has led up to this point in his life. A young murderer placed in the cell with him becomes a catalyst for Winter's life. He views the young man as the personification of a statue of Saint Sebastian which Claudia had admired in a village church in Tuscany but which had made him feel inferior. The bail money arrives, and Winter expects to forget the entire episode like a bad dream. But the experience will not leave him, the trauma will not end. The aesthete who had always considered himself superior to others and in control of his life has learned by being thrust into reality that he too is vulnerable.

"A novel that resembles a Kafkaesque puppet theater: a mad director regards the world as a stage that he alone controls. He forces his associates into roles determined by him - his directorial concept proves as absurd as it is consistent. Skwara, with his mastery of language, has composed not only a fascinating, intimate literary work but also a discourse on many evils of every era, including our own. Thus the novel, which originally was published in German in 1979, remains valid over the years and beyond its narrower theme."--Jacket.