"Shrouded in a thick cloud of cigar smoke, Hermann Arbogast Brenner, scion of an old and famous cigar dynasty, needs to settle his affairs, codifying his forty-six years of life, in a Proustian attempt to conjure the wounds, joys, and sensations of his childhood in the rolling countryside of the Aargau region of Switzerland. Estranged from his wife and two children, he decides there is no point in squirreling away his fortune, so he buys himself a...