Synopsis

Ever since he was very young, Andy has dreamed of Paris: the place where "habits," the implacable tyrants of his Milan, can finally be vanquished; the place where literature is something tangible, encountered in crowded two-room apartments or at café tables; and the place, certainly, where Parisian women live. But youthful myths are by their very nature destined to crumble, and perhaps it is precisely in the resulting disorientation that one can achieve a kind of "maturity," the acceptance of disorientation itself, the building of real, and therefore uncertain, relationships with places and people. The narrator of this novel mercilessly presents himself in the first person, and his constant, restless ruminations on himself, on his relationship with a city, on love stories that begin, end, or are simply imagined—these reflections, at once lucid and haunted, manage to touch, with great lightness, the deepest chords of existence, those tied to fundamental affections and our most intimate aspirations for happiness. His writing is perpetually tense, percussive, and rational, capable of alternating with incredible coherence picaresque adventures and incisive reasoning, always tinged with the irony of someone who is acknowledging the comical senselessness of things and the never-quite-clear, never-quite-authentic nature of the human being.