The Life of Henri Brulard

The initials of every woman he had loved, traced in the dust with the tip of a walking stick, on a hill above Rome with Saint Peter's and the Alban mountains laid out below: that is how this book opens, its author months short of fifty and asking what on earth he has been. What follows is the least composed autobiography in French, written at speed, in a private code of false names, and broken every few pages by little hand-drawn diagrams: the plan of a bedroom, where each person sat at a table, the exact stair on which something was said.