There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.

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

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

This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

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