The seduction takes place on the Ile de Mer, an island in the Mediterranean sosmall and unimportant that no one is quite sure which country it belongs to. Three people meet there by chance: Thalia, vibrant, alarmingly young, a would-bewriter seeking her muse who turns out to be Kneedler,thin, awkward, the skittishschoolteacher, and Waters, a once successful New York editor long retiredto the island, who casts his cynical eye on the romance and Thalia's relentlesspursuit of Kneedler, while he schemes his own sly and perfidious seduction.



Part comedy, part romance, Muse probes the workings of the creative mind, itsrelationship to sex, the passion with which both are negotiated and, finally,the way in which reality and imagination collide, take form and become art.