We begin in Paris with an introduction to five insignificant friends. One (Ramon) is walking past the new Chagall exhibition, but decides against visiting — not for the first time, nor the last — because of the queues. Another (D’Ardelo) is returning from the doctor’s, where he has learned that he does not have cancer — though he tells Ramon he does. Ramon’s friend Charles is a party organiser, who will soon be catering D’Ardelo’s birthday party. He does this with his friend Caliban, an actor without an acting career, who while on duty tries to make himself more interesting than he actually is by pretending to be an immigrant speaking only a meaningless gobbledegook he calls ‘Pakistani’. (It doesn’t work.) And then there’s Alain, who has mother abandonment issues, and who is going through a phase of obsessing rather obviously over the female navel.
What follows this introduction to our ‘heroes’ — all of them male, significantly — is a slight collection of trivial narrative moments, constructed to allow their
puppet-master novelist to dance around what he hopes to say.
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