A Peculiar Vigilance

An unnamed visitor and note taker wanders present day Paris in Antoni Jach’s new novel, researching something about the city’s ‘many layers’. This amorphous and arduous quest brings him to a certain library where, while he is waiting for a book on aboveground Paris to be retrieved, a spirited American woman tries to draw him out on his work and why he’s in Paris. He airily responds that his interest lies not only in the city’s underground layers but ‘the buildings and the ether’. He’s remote and strangely earnest yet she’s keen to meet him again, whereas he ‘feels like a barbarian’ in her company and is too neurotically preoccupied with some other kind of engage­ment, an exchange with history, to flirt.