Bird of Paradise

by Costanzo Costantini

Marta lives each day with the acute anguish of having been conceived without love. She feels like a plant without roots, an intruder in the world. Andrea realizes with a sense of euphoria that he lives in a condition of absolute precariousness, and thinks "you're born by chance and you live in chaos". An insane, delirious, intense passion develops between them, with an outcome that is inescapable. Marta and Andrea put to the test what Georges Bataille calls "the vertigo of the abyss", that abyss which separates every human being from another, but which exerts a fatal attraction upon them. The story is set in Rome at the end of the millennium, a city overwhelmed by the babel of the Holy Year and suffused by apocalyptic flashes.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000