Transparent Things

"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero—sullen, gawky Hugh Person—to Switzerland . . .  As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after  multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eight years later—following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment—Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past. . . . The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects."  —Martin Amis