Desire

<p>A well-known and celebrated man of American letters Anton Lotus has spent the last few decades living anonymously in a small semi-rural Pennsylvania town. After years of rather unabashed libertine behavior he finds himself faced with the curious and perhaps ironic circumstance of testing HIV positive at the age of eighty-three.</p><p>Lotus's physician refers him to a female counselor. Unaware of his true identity she recommends that he engage in scriptotherapy as part of his treatment. Rather than write about this illness Lotus-stubbornly unsentimental-instead uses the activity to write about the great pleasures and passions of his full life: a hymn of desire which he claims has been his guiding impulse and motivation and the pursuit of which he deems his true vocation.</p><p>Lotus constructs his memoir using four different narrative techniques-a parody of his modernist roots-and creates multiple layers of autobiography that are often associative as well as chronological following the habits of his memory. Above all Desire is a comic novel that ostensibly focuses on sexual desire but ultimately celebrates art love and the complex but singular experience of living.