I’ve just finished (for now) what must be the 20th draft of a manuscript about the murder of a French Catholic priest in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in the 1930s. I started this story at least a decade ago-with no plot, far too many perspectives and no sense where it was all going.
What’s emerged, after countless rewrites, is a story about two women who fall in love while investigating an old murder. What started as a tale of love and jealousy has turned into an exploration of mysticism and madness. A Madonna statue starts to weep in a remote ethnic minority village. A French priest grows increasingly insane and sees ghosts. The lines between the real and the felt grow blurred. I’m still not sure why it’s happened.
This morning, I discovered this quote by Albert Einstein:
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.