In the first two volumes of this trilogy we enter the private world of a brave young woman who grew up in a Midwest rural/small town environment.  But she is already caught up in the turmoil of a tragic marriage and faced with raising three small children, one brain-damaged.  Coping with stressful circumstances she becomes distraught, isolated, plagued with fears, panics, threats to her sanity.  Escaping to Germany she is essentially alone in a strange land as she struggles to get both her physical and emotional bearings.
     This final volume is short, a coda.  It arrives at resolution.  She works teaching English, uses math skills to do government computer programming.  And she finds herself once again cheated and shocked by the lover  to whom she felt so deeply committed that she followed him to Europe.
     Once again, profoundly distrustful, she attempts to maintain equilibrium as she struggles

with grief, loss, betrayal and her own longing for normalcy.  But these take their toll as she finds escape in drink, in food, in theater, in numerous trips to landmarks, mountains and beaches.
     But she is haunted by images of Paul.  As lovers do, she sees him in every stranger who faintly bears an aura or resemblance to him.  She misses him, even as she is annoyed by numerous men who seem to almost routinely test their appeal to a single foreign female.
     From various encounters she gleans snatches of information about flying saucers, laser beams, reactors and accelerators, ESP, spacemen and even meets women whose eyes burn in dim rooms or who materialize or disappear at will.  She attempts to rationalize all this into an environment of total malevolence towards herself.  In her shaky emotional state she struggles with unresolved conflicts and suppressed emotions until she finally confronts them in a surreal dream (vividly told) in which all the evil forces are punished or destroyed.  This is the turning point to her survival, a kind of epiphany.  She has decided she will no longer be buffeted by all the winds that blow.

     She had been letting them make all the rules.  That was why she could never win the game.  Now she was going to start making the rules to play her own game of life.
     The foreign land added to Barbara's vulnerability, but it also provided an education in German culture.  She visits many restaurants (wine and schnitzel) and theatres.  She goes to Innsbruck, the great castle of King Ludwig, Munich and environs, Tegernsee and on to Holland, Austria, Yugoslavia and the Italian Riviera.  The clear, authentic descriptions by a sensitive observer provide a solid but colorful setting as counterpoint to the shadowy milieu in which we flounder for so long with our hero.
     We end with a sense of hope that Barbara will survive with her hard-won insights and maturity to continue her life's odyssey.

The Windmill by Mario Edlosi, 85 pp., 1996, ISBN 1-877649-26-0, $6.95, perfectbound, $1.50 shipping.       Order book now.

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