A soldier travels through Europe on a doomed mission to track down his fiancée in this masterful and vivid evocation of life between the wars
Franz Tunda, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, is captured by the Russians in World War I. Imprisoned in Siberia, he escapes to a remote farm, hiding out in such deep cover that he only learns of the end of the war months after the final shots have been fired. When peace is at last declared, Tunda pulls out a crumpled photo of a fiancée he doesn't know—Irene is simply a beautiful face who represents the world before—and sets off in search of home.
But the old order has vanished, and Tunda finds himself swept along in the current of this new, terrifying world, surrendering to an impassioned love affair with a Russian revolutionary before drifting phantom-like through Europe's cities.
Meanwhile, Irene has made her own accommodation with the course of events, and grows ever more distant from the young woman in that photograph—that photograph carried next to Tunda's breast across a decade and a continent, heading inexorably toward a confrontation with its original in interwar Paris.
One of the most personal novels by the great eulogist of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this story melds wry humour and the experience of exile to reflect on the predicament of a man who can find no role for himself in a changed world.
