"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence. . . . Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the idee fixe, who have come close to surrendering to something or someone diabolically seductive or coercive, will recognize in these characters their own encounter with a dangerously systematized world." From the introduction.

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idee fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and...