At times in his life, Tom Harris is a dull schoolboy, an apprentice
barber, a delinquent husband, an old man with a monkey who drinks at the
Green Man Pub, il professore Harris at the University of Genoa, and
possibly a murderer. But the question of who the elusive Tom Harris
really is, and what crimes he has really committed, obsesses the
narrator of this novel. Tom Harris can perhaps be described as a sort of
philosophical detective story, ingeniously plotted and wittily told with
a stylistic virtuosity on par with the most playful works of Raymond
Queneau.