Set mostly in Switzerland in the 1930s, but published thirty years later, this very long and highly unusual novel is a genuine find. Its author was a Greek-born Jew who had studied law in Geneva and in 1939 fled from France to England for safety. A novel of over a hundred chapters, written in seven parts, is obviously not be to read and digested quickly - even if some of the chapters are no more than a few pages long. Much of it is satirical, aimed not only at the Swiss bourgeoisie but at the League of Nations, based in Geneva and then taken very seriously indeed; the style is often deliberately disjointed and rather stream-of-consciousness (Cohen must have read his Joyce) and there is a good deal of bedhopping in a rather decorous way. David Coward's translation from the original French won the 1966 Scott-Moncrieff Prize. B.F.
Reviewers: Brian Fallon, Arminta Wallace