FILIAD, a novel of intrigues, grudge and a fatal kiss by Danilo Peshikan; a defunct fatherhood story, a search of an answer to the damn question of our existence and secrets of the heart.



"I found that I was in the university library, sitting in its stuffy reading-room, wide-eyed and bent over a volume of Ovid. On the musty table in front of me, I had a pile of books... These works and many more, in fact, I leafed through and laughed with in the course of months, almost unaware of my line of research. Until one cool and cloudy windy day, with the sun holding back its horses in a quasi-European remoteness, threw its high light on the bibliography in my notebook of accumulated commentaries. And my shock was such that a sudden awakening in front of a symbolic pile of sniggering volumes in a stinking student library strikes me as a happy way of expressing it.



All at once, I realised that I was not even scraping the timeless-thyme surface. I was that ivory-mangling mythic islander who refused to believe it was the goddess's likeness that took shape daily under his chisels. And one evening the divine ivory seized the sculptor in her live embraces! It all happened amid classical excess of staple grape, moaning syrinxes, flutes and maenads contorted in the mist of young ivy, and drunken wise men goading old donkeys overloaded with the papyri of the world's history. Unwittingly, but sweetly aided and abetted by eternal childhood that squeaks and dies in every woman, I had approached a mystery of not only tender physical but of vast metaphysical depths. Choosing a direction was superfluous. Without consciously admitting it, kicking the rich yellow ore under my feet while gulping and slurping in poem and song, I had been journeying on my path of preference all along!"