'I went to Paris in the mid-seventies and there I was very poor and very unhappy. I would like to be able to say that I was happy like Hemingway, but then I would go back to being the poor, young man, handsome and stupid, who fooled himself on a daily basis and believed he'd been very lucky to be able to live in that filthy garret that Marguerite Duras rented him for the symbolic sum of a hundred francs a month' This brilliantly ironic novel about authors and literature, written in Vila-Matas's trademark witty and erudite style, tells of his two-year stint in Paris and the motley crew of writers, artists and eccentrics he knew there. Throwing himself into the caf culture of the city, our narrator encounters such luminaries as Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Mars , and embarks on a first novel which will 'kill' its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.