Narcisse on a Tightrope (French Literature)

For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, a chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called “cerebral rheumatism,” has lived in the protective wing of a mental hospital. Here he has been attended to by a bevy of nurses, with whom he has fathered a number of children (somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred and seventy-one; he can never arrive at the exact figure). But now, suddenly, the doctors have decided that he is cured, and that it is time for him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is somewhat flustered, to say the least. What follows is an account of this middle-aged patient’s adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. Narcisse must stumble long and hard before he learns to walk the tightrope the rest of us take for granted. Summoning the whimsy of Walser and the anomie of Goncharov’s Oblomov, Targowla has created a character for the ages. With an introduction by Warren Motte.