"As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East"--Amazon.com.
General Note
Originally published in French as Boussole by Acres Sud in 2015 (verso of title page).
Content Note
On the divers forms of lunacie in the orient -- Orientalists in love -- Caravan of cross-dressers -- Gangrene & tuberculosis -- Portraits of Orientalists as Commanders of the Faithful -- Encyclopedia of the decapitated.