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_A Wayward Glance
is the story of a traveling soul and her adventures in the world, from Mexico to Paris to New York. One day in Mexico City, Alma, an office worker and mother of four children, has a small accident: out the window she sees a rich woman and wonders how it would be to live her life. That most negligible part of Alma, the traveling soul, goes off for her to find out. So begins a tale of nine lives. As the real protagonist of this story, the traveling soul who began as Alma is a novice at transmigration: she learns as she goes along. Thus she recounts her discoveries, and sometimes still thinks of Alma, but mostly she offers the narrative of her new life, alternating with her hosts telling their own stories, each in turn. After months as Mercedes, the Mexican finance minister’s wife, she then inhabits Yvonne, a French social researcher who lives outside of Paris. Next, she will be Louis-Charles, a young French aristocrat banker; after |
__him, Emmanuel, a music producer from Gabon; then, Nelly, a trombonist from New York; Graziella,
a high school freshman living in Soho; Father Potocki, the new parish
priest on the Lower East Side; and, in the final chapter, Samuel Vital,
wealthy and retired on the Upper East Side, who takes a trip to Mexico.
Through the circuitous path of these lives, the traveling soul comes to
meet others like herself, other traveling souls, and in that way begins
to know about her own nature.
A final note: the transition from one person to the next, in the traveling soul’s journey, is by the passage of eye contact. Always a casual and chance encounter, with someone unknown, each chapter’s protagonist by the end of their narrative happens to see someone, locking gazes, about whom they wonder for a moment how it would be to live that person’s life. So every chapter begins and ends with a fleeting eye to eye encounter between characters. |