(MENAFN- Arab Times) NEW YORK Jan 2 (Agencies): Author Richard Bausch has explored unorthodox matters of the heart in his award-winning career. In his latest novel 'Before During After' a woman is stranded in Jamaica by the Sept 11 attacks unable to reach her fiance in New York. The woman Natasha Barrett is a senator's aide eager to contact her fiance Michael Faulk a faltering Episcopalian priest who was in New York for a wedding.
While the attacks and what followed frame the novel it is Natasha's rape in Jamaica around which 'Before During After' revolves. Bausch 69 spoke with Reuters about the book and being in New York during the attack. Question: How did this premise of the book come about Answer: It started as a story and I posted on Facebook that I'm writing one of the darkest things I've ever written. It was about a rape ... When the idea came that she goes to Jamaica I was thinking about 9/11 and it just started to happen. Q: Why did it take so long after Sept 11 to write A: I never even dreamed I'd write about 9/11. I was there in New York and didn't want to write about it. Then when I started to all that stuff started coming back. Q: As a male did you hesitate writing so graphically about Natasha's rape and how she coped A: No although I knew I was probably going to catch some s... for it. There's a whole group of people who think you can't write about the opposite sex. Q: Natasha's parents died in a cruise ship fire when she was young. She lingers on this while fearing Michael's death as she walks alone on the beach shortly before she is attacked. Were you suggesting that some people are somehow more prone to suffer tragedy A: No but I'm sure Natasha thinks that. She has learned to expect since her earliest memories are of crisis a bad outcome. Q: The detail-rich sections exploring reactions to 9/11 ring so true. How did you cultivate such authentic material A: It was a combination of things because I was there. The TV thing with Michael came from my own experience. I was in a hotel on 54th Street and my wife called and said 'Take a look out the window' and I said 'I don't see anything it's a perfectly pretty day.' My wife said 'Put the TV on.' For decades historians of literature have mulled the untimely death that met Constance the wife of the exuberant scandalous writer Oscar Wilde. An early pioneer for women's rights and a published author Constance had two children with Wilde but fled London with them in 1895 to escape a backlash after her husband was jailed for homosexual acts. But mysterious ill health headaches body pains weakness and trembling in the limbs partial facial paralysis and exhaustion dogged her throughout her self-imposed exile. In despair practically housebound she turned to a high-society Italian surgeon Luigi Maria Bossi who vowed to restore her to health with a radical gynaecological procedure. Five days after going under the knife she was dead aged just 40. What had happened A slew of unpublished letters unveiled by Constance's and Oscar's grandson Merlin Holland could provide the answer The Lancet reported online on Friday. Analysed by clinical pharmacologist Ashley Robins at the University of Cape Town Medical School in South Africa Constance's symptoms point to a disease that today is very well known: multiple sclerosis. The letters suggest that for its first seven years the disease was of the 'relapsing-remitting' type in which acute episodes were interspersed with periods of recovery according to the Lancet review. But in the last two years 'her disability became permanent with gradual deterioration... (and) subsequently developed into secondary progressive multiple sclerosis' it said. Constance was dealt a doubly tragic blow. Multiple sclerosis was described in 1868 by a ground-breaking French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Twenty years later the diagnosis was fine-tuned by an eminent British doctor Sir William Gowers. But it took years for awareness of this novel disease to spread among physicians of the day. 'Constance's doctors of the 1890s might have been unaware of this newly defined diagnosis and therefore puzzled by her unusual symptomatology' according to the Lancet study co-authored by Holland and Robins. A disease of the immune system in which the body's defences attack the protective myelin sheath around nerve fibres multiple sclerosis remains incurable today although there are drugs to slow its progression and ease symptoms. Constance's second great misfortune was to fall under the spell of Bossi who believed that insanity and neurological problems in women lay with lesions in the uterus and ovaries for which surgery was essential. Weakened by vomiting and dehydration after Bossi's surgery to remove a uterine fibroid Constance probably died of an obstructed intestine or blood poisoning the documents suggest. A professor of gynaecology at Genoa University and a fellow of the British Gynaecological Society Bossi fell out with his colleagues for championing surgery to fix now-discredited 'pelvic madness.' He was eventually suspended from his professorship for two years before being shot dead in his consulting room in 1919 by the jealous husband of a patient.
'Ultimately' notes the paper 'both Bossi and the hapless Constance met their end tragically: he by the bullet of an assassin and she by the knife of an irresponsible surgeon.'
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