Adventure and reflection interpenetrate. Chapters, even paragraphs, even single sentences, zigzag back and forth through time. Nor are the sequences made any more accessible by Cendrars’s penchant for rambling anecdotes, lengthy asides, footnotes, and the like. It is the content that excuses all the confusion. Familiarity with the voice and its owner provoke fascination. And as the reader submits to this fascination, the chronological jumble takes on a different aspect. He starts to experience the narrative with the acuity of one following a thread through a labyrinth. The time sense, the demand for sequence, are cast aside. The narrative, like the life, like any life, reveals that its true character is referential. A memory from childhood interlocks with an episode from later life—only a writer who has penetrated to the core of his being can offer us experience at this level.

Cendrars’s life, I will not tire of repeating, was epic, the appetites gargantuan. The Astonished Man is a perfect title, for at the heart of this network is the figure of Cendrars—stripping himself of myth, layering himself with myth, we are never sure which—the astonishment of being alive always in his voice.