Naked Before the World

Set in the late ’60s in a small mountain village on the island of Mallorca, NAKED BEFORE THE WORLD is a comic romp celebrating the follies of both hippies and the establishment. The novel has the same outrageous comedy as Luke’s classic novel The Dice Man, but tells the romantic (if somewhat erotic) love story between the rebellious artist Franz and the innocent Katya.
Arriving to study art at the recently established Lowdong Institute, Katya is thrown into the world of sex and drugs that is everything her mother and church warned her against. The mountain village is populated by artists, freaks and frauds, and Katya finds it hard to tell which is which. The erratic hippy Franz practices forms of random art, and Katya is warned to steer clear of him. With many of the men (and a couple of the women) coming on to her, Katya struggles to determine who to trust. When the famous artist Piccolo Londo asks her to help him paint his next masterpiece--he and his assistant always working nude--she hesitates, but all the respectable people assure her that it is a "great opportunity." When Londo turns out not to be what she had thought, Katya has to choose whether to accept Franz, who loves her, or bow to the establishment. At the end she knows who she wants to be and stands at last naked before the world . . . and before most of the village.