The Impersonal Adventure

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A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a mediocre hotel on the island lying at the city’s edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and abandoned offices, driven by only a faded name and address penciled into a notebook, he encounters and comes to know a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the “professor”; and a mute, hairless beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the fragmented drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter and its excess of antiquities, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the less than fortuitous role he is to play as witness to tragedy.Marcel Béalu’s novella, written in the 1940s but not published until 1954, slowly peels away an oneiric banality to reveal doubled lives and secret stories. The Impersonal Adventure utilizes a dreamlike logic to translate postwar trauma, urban devastation, alienation, and anxiety into a disorienting detective tale that unfolds in the empty streets and bric-a-brac shops of a De Chirico painting.