This extravagant novel marks the English-language debut of one of France's most exciting and controversial writers. At the center is a mysterious excavation site in southwest France, where the skull of a 500,000-year-old man has been discovered. Simon, a journalist assigned to do a story on the cave, is a voluptuary keenly responsive to his surroundings, finding an erotic patina over everything he sees, hears, touches, imagines."

Part detective novel, part investigation into the nature of knowledge, set in the mountains of Morocco when the French still controlled North Africa.

In a series of comic vignettes and letters, Mordechai Schamz sets out to investigate himself, his world, and the language which makes them both intelligible. Dumbfounded at every turn and undiscouraged by -- perhaps even unaware of -- his failures, he confidently gets lost in the labyrinth of his investigations. Reminiscent of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Calvino's Palomar, and Beckett's Watt, Mordechai Schamz ponders the mysteries of life through cliches and solipsisms, making himself the master of the illogical and the clown of the absurd.