An Ocean in the Eye is a story about a young woman; Chiara comes out of coma after surviving a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide and wakes up in an unfamiliar room where a mysterious red-haired foreign woman welcomes her. That moment is the beginning of her extraordinary spiritual adventure through fascinating landscapes of faraway lands, different time periods and cultures. Surrounded by strangers, she has no alternative but to follow the wise foreigner Maya on a faraway journey through an uncertain and unprecedented life experience. On that extraordinary adventure, in which she engages against her will to some extent, Chiara meets some of the most important historical figures who have shaped the history of civilization and were a key link for the general progress of mankind. Maya’s mission is to restore Chiara’s faith in people, love, meaning of life and God.
The first of many trips brings her to the coast of the Arabian Sea, far into India, into the thirties of the twentieth century. While acquainting with the beautiful landscapes of the exotic Hindu nation, she meets the great leader and father of the nation - Gandhi and his modest wife Kasturba. Through unusual events, contrived stories within the story and long conversations with this wise man, Chiara starts to perceive the world, people and faith in a very different way, for the first time opening her inner eye to the essence of life. The plot is quick due to the allegorical style of the narrator, which follows the main character on her strange spiritual cognitions with the same intensity as the readers. The novel is full of puns, contemplations, subtle conveyances of impressions and feelings, poetry and a cogency that miraculously flow through a rich form of storytelling, and the book itself, by its form, represents complete expressive freedom.
She travels from India to Nepal, to the time before Christ. There she sees life and people she never could have imagined. She personally relates to the story of a beautiful girl, Kame, and guided by her encouragement meets the great teacher, Buddha. After understanding the history, culture and life stories of people from a small village located in the valleys of Nepal and speaking with great Siddhartha, Ciara and Maya go to Europe, namely to Switzerland, to the home of the great psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. She attends one of the most fascinating dinners ever arranged in her honor, where Tesla and Einstein are among the guests. While conversing with them, Ciara undertakes a personal transfiguration and feels a strong yearning to return to her old life, reckoning that it is indeed worth of every new trial. The plot is full of tension also due to the fact that during the journey, the heroine doesn’t really know what happened to her, where she is or who is Maya, the woman who leads her to all those unusual places and people. Perplexed, elated, scared, astonished, Chiara is trying, more than ever, to recover her life and figure out what are Maya’s hidden objectives and whose is the inexplicable male voice that appears from time to time followed with a strong light and more than mysterious questions and wishes addressed to the confused heroine, caught up at the intersection of centuries, millennia, people and cultures around the world.
One episode takes place in former Judea, on the banks of River Jordan near Jerusalem, where she meets Jesus of Nazareth. Will he give her the answers she is vehemently yearning for? Will he dispel her doubts? Will she find out what is actually happening? All that is left to the readers to figure out. We are convinced that the readers will be, before they even realize, drawn into a very interesting, tense and uncertain adventure that will effect their own personal transformation after reading this unusual novel, since this rare and unusual book deals with the life of the soul and its relationship to spirituality and everyday life.
Daniella Knez draws her profound insights from the heritage of world religions and the relationship of modern man toward them, the storytelling illustrating the deep longing for the true awakening of man and his virtues and spirit which have been ignored, and aiming at identifying and enabling the essential good as man’s only truth to which he always must return and be guided by it. The phenomenal dissolving of time, typical for the stream of consciousness and narrative that follows events in different times and locations, makes the story far more interesting and mysterious. The author in a sophisticated way intensifies the richness of narrative with the ideas of great masterminds, poets of Romanticism and founders of modern psychology and anthropology. Danijela is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, or psychologist, her conceptions elude definition. Her book An Ocean in the Eye, with its lexically luxuriant, wise and friendly approach towards a modern (a)moral man, throws in our face a comprehensive ocean of spirituality which even the toughest souls will not be able to resist. This is a book that will surely compel atheists ‒ even the most stubborn who defend atheism with science ‒ to reconsider their determination.
The novel intends to convey a powerful message of hope, to unravel the religious meaning of humanity and to compel readers to rouse their personal spirituality and morality as a priority in human existence. It is unique for its ambiguously comprehensible philosophical perspectives that unconstrained flow throughout the narrative. An Ocean in the Eye is not a book in the usual sense, it is rather a spiritual journey that a man undertakes and that is worth more than any psychotherapy. Danijela teaches us how to nurture our soul, which is usually neglected, symptomatically emerging in obsessions, coercion, violence and addiction. An Ocean in the Eye is an inexhaustible source of insight on the position of man and the state of things today and it offers the reader an extraordinary deep satisfaction.
Currently unavailable in English.
For more information please contact the author: knez.danijela@gmail.com
