The deadwood beetle
(Book)

Signed by the author.

By chance, Tristan Martens comes across his mother's sewing table in an antique store, recognizing it because of an ambiguous, possibly anti-Semitic quotation he scratched into the underside. This encounter with his past leads to a friendship with the store's owner, whose Jewish husband lies in a vegetative state in a nursing home. Love blossoms slowly between them until, miraculously, the husband awakens from his coma a seeming vengeance against the guilt-ridden professor and the potential of love is snapped. Throughout, Martens's former graduate student helps him to maintain some intellectual enthusiasm with her exciting discoveries of a new beetle behavior discoveries that relate metaphorically to the story itself.