Is life all a dream? Are the clouds, birds and other men nothing but our own visions? Could it be that we ourselves are God? Gaspard Languenhaert, an eccentric eighteenth-century philosopher expounded his principle of 'selfishness' in the Paris salons and even founded a school in Montmartre. Here he taught his disciples that the world was nothing but the product of their own fantasies and that they were the only reality.
Two centuries later, a researcher chances upon Languenhaert and is so intrigued that he abandons his earlier work to follow this suspiciously elusive trail. His research takes him from Paris to Amsterdam, but above all it leads him to the depths of his own consciousness and the limits of rational experience where the mind reels nightmarishly on the brink of insanity.
Who better to tackle a story of logic turned upside down than Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, winner of two Molières for his latest play The Visitor currently being performed all over the world? From this bold and talented playwright now comes a beautifully told novel of astonishing modernity.
