He is the perpetual student unbound by place and time, who learned the art of love from Sappho, war from Napoleon (“call me Boni”) and climbed the steep scaffold with a refreshing drink for the hard working Michelangelo. This the narrator’s father achieves to perfection. Put another way, true survival consists in this: trust nothing and no one, yet love everything and everyone. Everything is both earthly serious and airy as life itself. Next we find ourselves in fin-de-siecle Vienna sharing an espresso with Freud.Īccording to the narrator’s father, appropriately unnamed and unnameable, historical time is a flow of events endlessly repeating themselves, where what is true one moment is false the next, what once beautiful now hideous. Barely do we arrive at the Crusades’ bloodbath when a zeppelin circles about Renaissance Florence’s Arno, and before we can catch our breath, Cologne is reduced to rubble through Allied bombardment.
In this novel, the narrator greets nay, welcomes readers into a world of the absurd, with boundaries of neither space nor time.
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