The garden of delights

the long version

The Garden of Delights is a novel unconventionally structured by alternating first-person narration chapters. One voice is that of a young Belgian girl, revealing in chapters titled Far, her family life and nascent interest in becoming a novelist. The other voice is that of an eighty-year-old novelist, depicting in chapters titled Here her serene and happy life with a much younger writer named Jim. She is also the kind stranger the young Belgian girl meets one day in Paris. These two seemingly contradictory women will eventually cut through space and time and become reunited in body and soul.