Still Life with Books

Like a prime Seinfeld episode, nothing really happens in this sometimes melancholy, often funny and always beautiful novel. Well, almost nothing: ultimately there is love gained and lost, betrayal and death. But this is merely the barest skeleton on which Lane, a peripatetic young English writer whose one earlier novel was published in France, hangs a parti-colored cloth of observations on Van Gogh, X-rays, dust, Aldous Huxley, reincarnation, waiting in a barber shop and the friendship between the ghosts of Borges (Jorge Luis) and Wilde (Oscar). The narrator, Leonard, is a self-deprecating `` romancier creatif '' who recalls the romance between his cousin Aldous and Azadina, an Egyptian woman. Fluctuating widely from the near to the distant past, from present reality to a lively dream world, Leonard describes the affair that consumed them for two weeks one summer in Paris and again, briefly, 10 years later. Leonard warns that he must disappoint readers who ``are possibly still waiting for the appearance of a `rounded character,' '' but what Lane offers instead is a prismatic language that for all its obvious intelligence and wit never places the reader at a distance. (Sept.)