Joel Agee

"Six-and-a-half-year-old Peter reads, dreams, and plays with his friends. He is a nascent explorer, artist, philosopher, mystic, and scientist...And the actual world around him is a unique one in history: a community of leftist emigrés who have found refuge in Mexico from the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe...But the emigrés long for home...slowly, Peter begins to comprehend that his world may be turned upside down"--

Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive "man without qualities" at the center of Robert Musil's great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other's spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich....