Translated from the French by Guido Waldman.
"I'm off," Ferrer calls out to his wife the day he quits the family nest and heads for a new life in Paris. She does nothing to detain him, and in due course sees him in the divorce courts. Ferrer, meanwhile, proceeds to console himself with a number of available ladies before setting off to the arctic in search of inuit artefacts to sell in his art gallery and, in the process, learns a great deal more about life's rich pageant.
As in Echenoz's earlier book, 'Lake', which won the European Aristeion Prize, the story is told in a quiet, deadpan, throwaway fashion, but the focus is brilliantly, indeed painfully, sharp from start to finish.
Winner of the 1999 Prix Goncourt.
