parisiana

He left as he came into my life, as a rumor.

Few will dispute the fact that he was a genius. To some he was known as the Casanova of Ibiza. He liked to think of himself as the Michaelangelo of the Baleares.

Ibiza had been his home since the early 1960s, when he began working in films. He cast convincingly as the Bedouin freedom fighter Ahmed in "The Lost Command" (1966), a Mexican captain Herrera in "Villa Rides" (1968), or captain Ahab of Nantucket on the seven seas.

He had star quality, much like Anthony Quinn, and exploited his good looks grooming his beard every morning before an original ink drawing by Picasso hung next to his mirror. Picasso's graceful lines were his music. Since coming to Spain he had incorporated the qualities of his surroundings, its sensuous lines, nuanced warm colors, all absorbed in his unique, visionary paintings.

"They are a vision in the mirror".

This rumor preceded his stepping into my life. It came from the Mexican Illuminati Berta Dominguez and her brother "Poncho", both great painters and great drunkards. We had a great time, all of us, and it seemed at times, as though Tequila was in the air.

Guns, Alain Claret's main character Eden realizes, had replaced books. Von Clausewitz claimed that “War is the continuation of politics by other means”; means dissected in EDEN, a cutting-edge thriller about todays globalised neoliberal economic practices.

The corrupt Mexican Senator Perez Estrada sends his daughter Juana to Paris, to trace money belonging to the Sinaloa cartel. On the day of the dead, the cartel declare their war of “economic expansion” in Paris, leaving a bloody mayhem and the political system in disarray.

Alain Claret flourishes in Paris, knows its ins and outs, transforming real Paris into the stage of deadly entertainment.

EDEN is Alain Claret's 7th “roman” under the auspicious banner of Editions Robert Laffont, Paris. Unknown in English, his writing is closer to Bret Easton Ellis, to Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler than his French counterparts. There are hints of Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes in EDEN. It is contemporary action-packed mystery writing at its best.

Luco(s) means sacred wood in ancient Gaellic. The Luxembourg garden is a man-made natural light-box whose inception took enormous human sacrifice, as history and archaeological evidence demonstrate.

How did it all begin? Originally Druids performed sacred rites here in the woods. Thus it's not surprising to be called Luco, a Latin term coined by students of the Latin quarter and the Sorbonne.

The Luxembourg garden rises 40-50 meters above the water-level of the Seine, to the west of the montagne Saint Genevieve, where the Pantheon stands today and 2000 years ago stood the Forum.

The deepest well discovered in the Luxembourg garden goes 28,5 meters down. Julius Caesar called the gently sloping hill mont Leucotitus, after the Leuci, a Gaulish tribe originally from Toul, near the grand duchy of Luxembourg.

Before the Parisii, a different Gaulish tribe, arrived around 300 BC, and settled on the current ile de la Cité, Leucotitus was a strategic vantage point overlooking the Seine from a safe distance. The banks of the river and ile de la Cité that later became the bastion of Paris, were still marshland.