Ice in my Eyes Smoke in Yours

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Ice in my Eyes Smoke in Yours

Author: T.Wignesan
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9789385945366
Publisher: Cyberwit.Net
Pub. Date: 2016
Price: $40

This story set mainly in the fifties of a beaten-down and divided Germany best depicts the state of a nation's changing mores and psychological plight in the aftermath of the country's meteoric rise to military might over Europe in the twenties and thirties. This is the Germany of the Wirtschafts-wünder boldly slipping out from under Allied military control while their cousins under Russian supervision strove in silence. We see nearly all the players evolve in the microcosm of academic life: the fresh German school-leavers suddenly jostling with non-Aryans Blacks from the States, the Caribbean, the Dark Continent, and Asians of all shades. In this clash of cultures, the older generation - wise enough not to show their disapproval - watched in dismay how freely previous sexual taboos in the wake of American largesse were whittled down. German elasticity in learning (in the arts, one could be enrolled for a doctorate right from the start) even brought droves of Jews back. Blacks on G.I. bills openly declared they were definitely not returning home with their families, the issue of open miscegenation. Many the indigenous girls - the off-spring of soldiers who never returned from the Russian, African or Western European fronts - thought otherwise, but their dreams of crossing the Atlantic often never came true. In this frenzied climate, Theson, the unidentifiable protagonist who stands probably for all such "transgressors" pays the ultimate price for this un-nameable sin. A casual encounter in one town leads to total disaster in another. All doors get slammed in his face. He becomes the victim of a world that might have existed had it not been for the War. Yet his fate is moulded by accidental circumstances. And it is precisely this particular destiny which displaces to advantage the other brighter world going on all around him. His story therefore is a-typical. Only the hard truth of meaningless behaviour gets to be recounted. Would you have preferred to read of a typical but inane tale of roses and rimes? Then, don't buy this book.

Author BIO

T.Wignesan

T. WIGNESAN: Born in Kuala Krai, Malaysia. Worked and studied from the age of 8 (short interregnum: 1946-49). Up to his twenty-first year grew up in Singapore, Port Swettenham, Klang, Sungei Rengam, Kuala Lumpur, Madras, Seremban, Kuala Lumpur; then in London, Heidelberg, West Berlin, Schwäbisch Hall, London, Madrid and Paris.