... memoir-in-old-age novel came to Paris shortly after the Armistice in 1919. Father was a high-class gigolo, always off with another rich woman (and Mother knew it--which is why she, though French?...?更多??, stayed in the U.S.). The son, therefore, fended for himself, getting a job as a translator/typist for an English-language news service that was covering, as was all of France, the unfolding ghoulish tale of Landru, the short, dapper, and unlikely bourgeois Bluebeard accused of swindling and killing dozens of women. What s more, the narrator s typing job also leads this young innocent-abroad to Gertrude Stein (by chance: she was selling a typewriter she didn t care for). With these setups, then, Wiser (K, The Wolf Is Not Native to the South of France) is able to people his historical reinvention with the stuff of newspapers and the stuff of literature and art as well: Alice B., Picasso, Braque. And then the narrator also meets Fleur--an ex-prostitute and model haunted by thee ""disequilibre"" of nightmares and a hidden past; she serves Wiser as a kind of spatula, neatly flipping the book and reinforcing the Landru theme at the same time. In fact, the Bluebeard s escapades at first just mystify and mock the young man, who s busy with his own sexual education. Then, when he finds Fleur--and when, later, she disappears--the Landru monster enters his thoughts more personally and darkly: what became of Fleur, lost without a trace? By the end, then, sexual crime has moved out of abstraction and into apprehension. Wiser handles all of this very trimly; the writing has a crisp authority to it; and if the disparate pieces never actually lock as tightly together as they re meant to, they still carry sufficient charm, piece-by-piece. Sophisticated, underplayed work from an increasingly intriguing writer. *Originally intended for June publication, this book is receiving very early reviews.