A feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story
for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor
understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his
employer pays no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly
desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground
passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different
times and settings and start rival stories against his will. This
brilliant, wryly humorous work tells of the sadness of the world and of
the inadequate means that language and storytelling offer for describing
and understanding it. Yet it does so in Tulli's characteristically
clear, concrete, gorgeous prose. This extraordinary work, unique in both
form and message, shows a European master at the height of her powers
and constitutes a major contribution to a new century of European
literature. A wildly inventive page-turner.