My Other Spruce and Maple Self

"e;Early on you are assailed by an image so potently repellent, so graphically horrible that it squats in your brain and refuses to be dislodged."e; Jonathan Meades"e;Susan Finlay has a staggeringly beautiful prose style that belies a devastating viciousness. And, what's more, she knows how to tell a story."e; Anouchka GroseDescription - "e;I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them. Whether they are good or bad is beside the point..."e;A nameless graphic designer is haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned. Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy's present 'economic miracle', he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms with "e;arrows, signs, advertisements"e;; invents a new, purposefully incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes even more unbalanced. He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young, Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war. Known primarily as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of his birth, and with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael Bracewell, Equilibrium remains a relevant, powerful, and intensely visual account of a broken but (post-)modern man.