For the narrator of Motion Sickness, life is an unguided tour,
populated with hotels, art, strangers, books, and movies. Adrift in
Europe in the late 1980s, she improvises a life and a self. In London,
she's befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious
husband, who may be following her. In Paris, she discovers Arlette, an
art historian obsessed with Velazquez's painting "Las Meninas." In
Barcelona, she is befriended by two generations of Germans, pre- and
post-World War 2. She tours the hill towns of Italy, in a London taxi,
with two surprising Englishmen, brothers in pursuit of art and Henry
Moore. And everywhere she goes she collects postcards.