What a lovely little book. I don't know whether the impression it's left on me will prove evanescent or whether I'll be recalling it years hence but at the moment I'm terribly pleased that I happened on it.

Detailed accounts of the plot can be found elsewhere, but the guts of it is that a chap takes a job in a foreign city, ultimately because the name of the city appeals to him. Once there he soon forsakes that job for another and then wanders through a friendship, an affair, an acquaintanceship with a local.

I'd originally begun this review warning off people who value dramatic incident and sympathetic protagonists but then I realised that there are plenty of dramatic events in the book and that, no doubt because I am myself a rather aimless sort who spends more time gathering wool than carding it, I did in fact sympathise with Quentin. The thing is that just as Horem employs a simple style and detached tone she doesn't treat incidents that many authors would highlight as IMPORTANT EVENT as dramatic ones and she imparts a sense of the main character not only by recounting his obvious meanderings but by his internal ones. I don't mean that she portrays Quentin as someone rendered ineffectual by a tug o' war between id and ego--nothing of the sort, nothing so potentially dramatic nor explanatory. Fever hallucinations, betrayal by lover and family, being lost in the streets of a foreign city, a holiday week with a new lover, the departure of his closest friend, dealings with a menacing thug--they're all simply things that Quentin meets with and not things that seem half so evocative and so telling as the fragments of his memories and thevague images evoked by shadows flickering in the light cast by his candle.

Spare, menacing, atmospheric, obliquely melancholy.