The starting point of Alberto Moravia's latest excursion into the black comedy of sexual foibles is in mid-air, on the Paris—Rome flight. Mario de Sio, an Italian student brought up in Paris, is suddenly called to Rome by the widowed father he has not heard from for fifteen years. Meeting his father — now a prosperous but mildly absurd figure — is one shock, but rediscovering the apartment where Mario spent his early childhood is another, a shock that awakens vivid fragments of a disturbing memory. Reopening a locked door, Mario is confronted by the remembered image of his mother making love with his father's business partner on a floral cretonne sofa. This image, startlingly complete in all its ridiculous detail, becomes an obsession to Mario. The only way to exorcize the scene, he reasons, is to re-enact it, but the mechanics of reconstruction present formidable obstacles. Friendless and alone in the city of his birth, and unable to recognize even the major tourist sights, Mario is at a loss to find the right setting, the right time, and the right partner. His father's witch-faced Slavonic maid offers some hope, but.. . The attractive widow he met briefly on the plane seems a possibility, but. . . Her gawky adolescent daughter is infatuated with him, but. . . A middle-aged chanteuse, a client of his father's agency, is all too willing, but. . . As hopelessly irresolute as he is helplessly obsessed, Mario finds that all routes to his own fantasy are blocked by the dreams of others, and his attempts to obliterate memory entangle him in escalating farce. Clinical yet erotic, chillingly dispassionate yet solidly humane, Moravia remains at the peak of his power as the supreme pathologist of the human comedy.