Introduction

Transnational Identities 333
during the night” (EP 135). It is his “world” (EP 135), and as Elizabeth Kella
observes (100), Kip even symbolically sleeps half inside, half outside his tent (EP
81) which locates him simultaneously in his private world in the tent and the
world surrounding it.
Similarly, the desert is another “in-between space […] where the concept of
national enclosures and imperial boundaries collapses” (Burcar 103). The patient
explains that “it is easy to lose a sense of demarcation” there (EP 20) because
“nothing was strapped down or permanent, everything drifted” (24). The desert,
too, is a “trompe l’oeil”, both real and at the same time a painting of “time and
water” (EP 257) which makes it possible for the community of desert explorers to
reconcile irreconcilable differences there. Thus they can be in the oxymoronic
state of being “desert European[s]” (EP 260), simultaneously belonging to both
the desert and Europe. Like the inhabitants of the villa they can likewise be
“planetary strangers” (EP 259; see also EP 49): different but nevertheless connected
in the same “system” (EP 79). Both communities are therefore connected
by a sense of transnational groupness.
However, for all its emphasis on connectedness, the novel from the start
points out the inevitable destruction of these two transnational spaces, which is
foreshadowed long before the war and the dropping of the atomic bombs. The
atmosphere in both the desert and the villa constantly stresses the illusionary nature
of both spaces. At times they appear like the magical landscape of fairy tales
in which – in the case of the villa – characters from books come alive as when
Kim’s entrance into the villa community seems to Hana as if he has stepped out
of Kipling’s Kim (EP 117) after “those long nights of reading and listening” (EP
118). The patient’s “talk[ing] in his circuitous way” (EP 95) in addition portrays
him as a storyteller who imagines stories such as “the half-invented world of the
desert” (EP 160). It is made clear that he does not care about “the outside world”
(EP 152), namely reality, which is especially apparent in the patient’s description
of the desert.
The patient’s desert is an otherworldly, mystic place filled with eclipses and the
“half-darkness of the covered sun” in which power is drawn “into his body from
the universe” while he is surrounded by the eerie sounds of “wind chimes” (EP 9)
and clinking glass bottles through which one can see “translated light – blues and
other colours shivering in the haze and sand” (EP 10). At times he is not even
sure if this is dream or reality (EP 24). 40 In any case, both places seem more like
fantasy structures than reality and bear little resemblance to their real counterparts
which is unsurprisingly emphasized by descriptions of the villa as a “miniature
world” (EP 49) which just as the desert community is separated from the outside
world (EP 42; 118; 156). These places appear to exist in and of themselves, com-
40 One could argue that the patient is at this stage somewhat delusional because of the burns he
suffered in the plane crash but his obsession with the dream-like, invented character of the desert
can be found even before that. See for example EP 261-62.