The Impersonal Adventure

Translated, with an afterword, by George MacLennan / October 2022 / 4.5 x 7, 144 pp. / 978-1-939663-72-6 A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a mediocre hotel on the island lying at the city’s edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and abandoned offices, driven by only a faded name and address penciled into a notebook, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the “professor”; and a mute, hairless beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the fragmented drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter and its excess of antiquities, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the less than fortuitous role he is to pla