Book description
This charmingly inventive, deliciously improbable seriocomic novel
opens at eleven o'clock in the morning of July 14 in the year 2000 on
the Avenue d'Angleterre in Beirut. Private George Smith of the
American Peace-Keeping Forces in Lebanon is breathlessly chasing a
hand grenadeÂ-which he threw in the line of dutyÂ-down the street. It
seems he forgot to pull the pin. At that very moment, one Heloise
Svejk is crossing the street from east to west, bearing an empty
coffin on her shoulder. From this unlikely encounter is born one of
the great love stories of the first year of the twenty-first century,
not completely unworthy of that of Heloise's namesake nine centuries earlier.
Private Smith is a reasonably sane soldier, as sane at least as
any oversized American of mixed Swedish and Austro-Hungarian descent
from Alabama who has not been with a beautiful for two years can be.
Now Smith knows, inevitably and irrevocably, why fate has posted him
to this godforsaken city. He disappears with Heloise for all the right
reasons, but for General Custer, Private Smith's commanding officer,
when you're gone for five days you're gone for good, fellow, and
Washington is so informed. When news spreads that Smith is not dead
but only hopelessly in love, the plot does not merely thicken but gets
downright sticky. What will Custer tell the President? What will he
tell George's next of kin, and how will he get back the posthumous
award for unusual bravery he sent her? And yes, what about this
Heloise they are all drooling over? In page after page, chapter after
chapter, these and countless other cosmic questions are discussed and
dealt withÂ-with mixed results, as the author is quick to point out.
Interspersed with the chapters are intermezzi in which the
author muses and comments on George, Heloise, life, love, Harry's Bar,
his father Giuseppe, peach nectar and champagne cocktails (aka Â
bellinisâ ), and Cousin WandaÂ-not to mention Abelard himself, the
inquisitive, inflexible, and highly unimaginative friend of the author
to whom the intermezzi are addressed.
