Böcker av George Saitoh

If one cannot live alone, without attachment, under whose control ought responsibility for one's life be shared? A child recruit, IRA sniper Eoin is still a teenager when he decides to escape, first to England then on to Germany and the inevitable face-off with his pursuers.In attempting to circumference his past from a Cambodian retirement home for mercenaries the protagonist recalls scenes from a final, crippling mission to Africa, and traces a pivotal moment when a young fugitive seeking an ordinary life lapses into violence more extreme than he or his pursuers ever imagined.If it appears possible for him to reconcile the fragments of his life and navigate the errors of the past before, like the man next to him, his mind goes, then My is the catalyst for this hope. A care worker, My is the only other with whom he feels emotional attachment. When she abruptly disappears he must find the will to complete his work alone, find another source of support or give up entirely- a return to a state he seems to have always been prepared for.

Li'l Hat & Hold Still are two interrelated plays on the loss of self in an intimate relationship, the fear it arouses, and the desperate attempts to keep the inexorable at bay without foreclosing on the last-perhaps only-mutually consenting intimacy one has known. This, while not forfeiting one's privilege-which may indeed be a right-to ongoing consent, arguably the final value by which human dignity is exercisable and thereby recognizable to oneself and to others. When the cost of No or Stop fluctuates too high, and Yes seems out of the question, one is left to one's own primitive resources to move forward. That is to say one is alone and trapped. In Li'l Hat, a couple struggles to kindle a dormant connection through a meaningless act of physical intimacy, the pursuit of which is violent for its relentlessness. Only when all hope appears to have been shattered do they find their connection. In Hold Still an act of grooming between a couple becomes an imaginary nightmare of voyeurism and vulnerability that must be transformed into destructive reality for it to end.

The closed loop of an island family is bounded on the inside and outside by violence. Life performs its rigid and terrifying circuit until one by one each child flees into the night-choosing the totality of external chaos over continuing to face it on two fronts along a worn track where hope died a generation before. David, the last to flee breaks the island, the circuit, and the camel's back. In a psychotherapist's salon the fragments of the island are hallucinated back into a narrative loop of double-bind despair. But this time round with a less unbeautiful-and more foreign-prospect.