False Light

Sheldon was a successful travel writer who was tragically blinded in a car accident in 1987. Becoming increasingly frustrated by his inability to produce his guidebooks and to teach without embarrassment, he became obsessed with a project to write the story of his emotional and sexual life. When the project was finished, he committed suicide. The autobiographical novel begins when Karl is an adolescent in Vienna. Born in 1919 of a wealthy Jewish father and a gentile mother, he fled to Australia when the Nazis came to power, took Australian nationality and a name to go with it, and after the war he settled in Athens. He was handsome, intelligent, popular and had every advantage, but he was surrounded by political tensions and erotic undercurrents which dazzled him.