The Iron Parachute is not the story of X or Y. It can hardly be called a story at all. It begins with an arrival and it ends with a departure, but in between it behaves like the dragonfly's larva which hides in a little tube made of tiny bits and pieces of matter collected on its way through the water of a brook: moving through a variety of environments in the course of time it draws to itself odds and ends that happen to attract its attention. These may come uninvited, from inside and outside the human body, outer space and the scientist's lab, the wilderness and the metropolitan jungle, dream worlds and ancient history, comics and learned discourses on art - gatecrashers on the brain, like they do in the maelstrom of everyday life. Somewhere in the middle of this visual and verbal pandemonium lives a vague entity, a consciousness that intermittently materializes in human form, sometimes as an actor but mostly as a witness. No wonder that it took 47 years to complete the book.