A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.

How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it.