Il giro del mondo di un biricchino di Parigi

Summary

A mischievous Parisian urchin, part guttersnipe part dream-cartographer, hijacks a hot-air balloon at dawn and threads the planet’s wind-veins like a bead on wire: above Marseille he drops a boot that lands in bouillabaisse; over Tangier he trades insults with veiled storytellers who answer in wind-chimes; across the Sahara he drags his shadow like a black kite until it frays into mirage; in a Bombay bazaar he swaps his last centime for a mango seed that later bursts into a monsoon of memory; over the opium haze of Canton he learns that maps lie more than mothers; above the Pacific he converses with a storm that speaks in the voice of his dead seamstress mother, her syllables salted; he circles the frost-bitten Andes where condors wear the faces of gendarmes who once chased him through Montmartre fog; finally he descends onto a Greenland iceberg that drifts backward into the Seine, completing a Möbius itinerary where departure and return share the same scar.

Synopsis