Filiad, an aloof father growing Lolita-like obsession with his daughter

I have always been an aloof father to Blanche. When she was about four she tried to monopolize my masculine interest by displaying samples of an admirable feminine curiosity about the world. She would open her puckered fist and show me a dead leaf, a live mouth, a piece of Parisian dirt—"Tiens! Tiens!"—until I yelled for help and Olya came to lead the pouting child away with her treasure.

The melancholy fact is (after entire whirlwind) that I don't like children. I never did! The child I was had loved his socialite mother with the anticipated exigent and doomed love. But the man I was to become had simultaneously indulged the fancies of my English and piano teacher since the glorious age of ten. My Inge was a passionate, unselfish girl who had no one in the shrivelled German world and the transporting power of a philharmonic in a single pair of hands. I obeyed all their teachings gladly. Inge's hands! They were fated to exert their remote influence upon my defunct fatherhood story, just as her shaky grasp of the sublime lingo has left its mark on this transfiguration of it.

The corollary of all this was that I worshipped experience, disdained young girls of my age, and could not stand children. They reminded me of my own fiasco. "Vulnerable" youth indeed! I gave no credence to the idea unless when applied to a few borderline cases I could count on the fingers of my right hand—Keats, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath might have had vulnerable childhoods! However, the young and the very young continued to get on my nerves. So on that May night in 1993 which fate was rolling nearer, the night of the blue blast, I felt nothing of the universal shiver you fathers know so well, nor did the sweetest of her breath upon my stubble lure the blood away from my ticking brain, as I carried my sleeping offspring from car's back seat to child's bedroom, the Princess of the ball.

Now, what was I doing living with my family in this sleepy African city thirty-one long years after those cataclysmic events?

Teaching – my contract with the University of Zimbabwe said self-consciously. Running away from old cold Europe and a precocious mid-life crisis, would be my diary's – if I had had one – chosen words. Laughing my head off, however, would be a more inclusive answer. Laughing as I sunned myself by the university swimming pool in the company of other expatriate lecturers without a care in the world. Laughing at the epileptic fits of murderous rage thrown by the ruddy “Rhodies” as they replayed the lost war on the Harare shooting range I shared with them twice a week. Laughing in the ruddy faces of my local faculty colleagues when one after another they felt compelled on solemn celebratory occasions to stand up and raise a toast, beady eyes glazed, long lips snarling, to the President Mugabe, “that Martin Luther King of Africa”.

Review: "Peshikan writes with incomparable penetration on the most delicate and difficult of subject matters. This marvelous, thought-provoking, daring novel depicts the besiegement not of the Homeric walls of Troy, but of the tender walls of a willfully capricious daughter. It encompasses, in a brilliant modern take on Nabokov's original, the agonizing battle that defines Besovsky's relationship with Blanche." — Literary Fiction Book