Isham Cook, an English teacher in China, has it all worked out. He lives a highly ordered life of the mind and is not one to be swayed by circumstance, until his dispassionate existence is tripped up by Cookie, an elusive woman fleetingly glimpsed around his gritty Beijing neighborhood. He then becomes captivated by the flamboyant eroticism of a woman he meets on the subway, Luna, who radically overhauls his most basic preconceptions. A third woman of ambiguous Asiatic ethnicity, the beautiful Adalat, is as unknowable as the others and he becomes obsessed with her as well. Finally, a fourth...
Isham Cook, an English teacher in China, has it all worked out. He lives a highly ordered life of the mind and is not one to be swayed by circumstance...
To track down Cookie, an elusive woman fleetingly glimpsed around his Beijing neighborhood, expat Isham Cook employs tips from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Simone Martini's painting of the Annunciation and Louis Althusser's Lenin and Philosophy. Meanwhile, Luna, a woman of flamboyant sexuality who invites her dinner guests into bed, assists Isham in the seduction of a third beauty of ambiguous Asiatic ethnicity, Adalat. But revelations from the philosopher of parody Jean Baudrillard begin to eat away at reality until Isham can no longer clearly distinguish Luna from Adalat or...
To track down Cookie, an elusive woman fleetingly glimpsed around his Beijing neighborhood, expat Isham Cook employs tips from Shakespeare's Romeo ...
