The Rat Veda

This novel is about an absence. Rat is in love with a dancer he has never seen. He tries to forget her. He hears her feet dancing overhead. She is all he cares about. He finds many reasons why he should not love her. He desiccates his heart through work, he grinds his heart to powder with absurdly difficult tasks. He turns all the love in him over to ideas, to abstractions, to darkness. He tries to occupy his whole heart with the desperate unrequited worship of a subway train. For years he tries to kill his emotion in every possible way. And every minute of every single day he thinks about her, this absent love, this possibility, and constantly hears her dancing footsteps over his head. In order to meet her, in order to love her, he is going to have to change.