You don't find novels like this every day. As it happened, I found "Lost Books" last week in Barnes & Noble. Of all places. Can't be as good as these back-cover blurbs claim, I thought. But it was. Is.

There was a time when I searched high and low for works like this. Read everything I could find by S. Lem. Loved Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" more than anything. Borges. Cortazar. Nabokov. Sorrentino. Then nothing for years -- I was as lost as Odysseus, but not in a heroic way.

Well, perhaps like the cowardly Odysseus of one of the chapters. The one who simply walks away from the final furious battle at Troy, walks down the beach until cries, clamor, and firelight fade away, and starts a new life as an itinerant bard. That was one of my favorite variations in the book, and there are many others. Such as -- but no need to recount the novelistic pleasures of this text, since by now you will have read it.