Michael Henry Heim

Interweaves story and dream, past and present, and philosophy and poetry in a sardonic and erotic tale of two couples--Tomas and Teresa, and Sabina and her Swiss lover, Gerhart. A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals--while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything...

"This parable of censorship and the modern state centers on Hantá, a trash collector whose habit of salvaging and reading discarded books has brought him both the richness of the classics and the ridicule of his boss. In the process of compacting, Hantá has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of the trash compactor and now his house...