Played out against the backdrop of Paris before the start of the First World War, Tarr tells the blackly comic story of the lives and loves of two artists--the English enfant terrible Frederick Tarr, and the middle-aged German Otto Kreisler, a failed painter who finds himself in a widening spiral of militaristic self-destruction. When both become interested in the same two women--Bertha Lunken, a conventional German, and Anastasya Vasek, the ultra-modern international devotee of "swagger sex"--Wyndham Lewis sets the stage for a scathing satire of national and social pretensions, the fraught...