John Gilmore

Head of a Man (Reality Street Narrative) John Gilmore

A man stops at a backpacker hostel overlooking a terraced valley in an unnamed Asian country. He moves into a single room and does not move on. The victim of a recent trauma he is unable to remember clearly, he begins a solitary vigil, waiting for his story to surface. Watched over by the local woman who runs the hostel, he finds himself slipping into the underworld of his own mind, where memory fractures and identities blur. Women encircle him - ministering to him, troubling him, luring him with stories of their own. "Imploring the grace of language", he waits and listens for the words that will set him free. This poetic narrative subverts one of the primary stories of Western culture, Odysseus' entrapment by the sorcerer Circe and his subsequent journey to the underworld. Resonant, at times unsettling, Head of a Man is a portrait of a contemporary man at an impasse.