This brief and poignant novel by Wilhelm Genazino explores existential questions as its 46-year-old narrator reflects on broken relationships and other failures and struggles to come to terms with life.<BR>Employed by a high-end shoe manufacturer to test new products, the narrator spends his days wandering through his native city, encountering faces from his past (many of them female) and reflecting on the mystery of life. In the grand tradition of literary flaneurs, he assembles his surroundings, from the significant to the mundane, into a sort of mental collage that is at once self-portrait and cityscape.