<P>It was the lies he told that reminded me of that past of mine that I hadn'tencountered in a while. He was telling me the kinds of lies where the teller implies that thingsthat have only happened to him once are long-running habits. Things about too much whiskey, Célineand De Sade, eating alone in expensive Japanese restaurants, knowing nobody (this last fact he wouldcontinue to repeat in later meetings, it seeming more barbarously unreal each time). -- from<I>Nicola, Milan</I></P><P>Vaguely employed as a brand strategist in aB-version of the Italian Glamour export economy, the twenty-five-year-old unnamed narrator of<I>Nicola, Milan</I> is an international loner, watch checker, tip leaver, shit-talker,drifting from bar to airport lounge, taxi to hotel foyer, drunk and caffeinated at the same time,trying to explain to you the finer points of how to pitch an idea of Italy toAmericans.</P><P>But when he meets the slightly older, richer, and worldlier Nicola, hebecomes fascinated with him, seeing Nicola as a transcendental exemplar of theinternational-creative class culture he both envies and loathes. As the narrator stalks Nicolathrough the streets of Milan and its outskirts, what began as a casual friendship develops into anobsessive attachment, a crisis of identity connecting two hustlers, and a struggle against the quietoblivion usually hidden by the web of tics and affectations that constitute apersonality.</P><P>Combining a Houellebecq-like sense of the psychic malaise beneath thesurface of contemporary cultural life with the dispassionate voice of a police report, <I>Nicola, Milan</I> tells a story of perverse, asexual frenzy emptying out into thevoid.</P>