On a sultry day in the Russian steppes, the narrator, then a young soldier, kills a man in self defense. Years later, in a crepuscular Paris of lamplight and rain, he reads a story by a certain Alexander Wolf describing the incident from the (assumed) dead man’s perspective. In what follows, the narrator does not so much consciously seek out Alexander Wolf (although he does some of this) as encounter his repeated return (like that of the repressed). Gazdanov’s extraordinarily good novel twists between the sensual and the cerebral, while taking on big themes: death and love, fate and coincidence, the incongruities at the heart of ourselves and others that both obsess and elude us. Normally I’m sceptical of attempts to describe the impact of books in physical terms, but this one left me a bit dazed.