Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel
laureate André Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures is a brilliantly sly
satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the
unmotivated crime.
When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris,
learns that he's heir to an ailing French nobleman's fortune, he's
seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads,
he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an
imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an
atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of
wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With
characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby
the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse
Lafcadio--one of the most original creations in all modern fiction--goes
free.