His observations charge his surroundings with an eroticism otherwise only possible between skin and skin. His flesh seems to creep into the substance of the things, there’s a kind of promiscuity with inanimate ornaments. And the substance responds with a similar promiscuity, coupling with the flesh of its observer. Something forbidden pulsates between the person and the object, something that smacks of incest, of overindulgence, of pleasure, and of sinful intensity. Time and again, the search for the self ends in an exaggeration of identity. Time and again it is driven to a new extreme until it is suddenly called off as though too spooked to continue. The objects themselves, their features, become surrogates. They offer no answer, yet they usurp the place of everything the narrator wants to discover about himself.

Here is a description of a gypsy’s ring: “The extraordinary embellishments used by birds, animals, or flowers for purposes of sexual attraction . . . the hysterical lace of petunia petals. . . . It was made of marvelous tin—fine, grotesque, and hideous. Yes, hideous more than anything. It got at love in its deepest, darkest regions.” In an office with leather chairs and subdued lighting, “the screen of an enormous pewter spittoon in the shape of a cat stood gleaming in a dark corner.” “The glass windowpanes wobbled a bit in their frames like loose teeth.” And inside the crystal coffin of a wax figure cabinet is “a woman with a pale, yet luminescent face, lying in a glass box and sheathed in black lace, a striking red rose between her breasts, her blond wig coming undone at the forehead, the rouge in her nostrils aquiver. . . . It remained lodged inside me, still vague, like a word I wished to recall.”

The adolescent vagabond falls for the objects, because he’s fallen for the eroticism of sensory perception. And as the things themselves become increasingly transparent through his close observation, he becomes less and less transparent to himself. Particular details inflame or cool his ardor: his body is now attracted, now repelled by the things. His flesh is a magnet. His organs alone are insufficient, they need something else, and they lie in wait for the objects, which are likewise in need. Their features entice the body, wresting away its feelings which they then consume. The internal and the external engage in mutual indecent assault, and in the end it’s impossible to say which side instigated the voracious encounter—whether the person assailed the object to the point of breakdown, or vice versa. The paths beneath the feet are constantly hoisted into the head. And roaming through the space that exists between feet and mind inevitably leads to lonely realizations. The differences between the beautiful and the ugly, the anguished and the elated, are no longer possible in this book. The intensity of perception climbs right through the skull, the “melancholy of existence” and the “normally organized torture” render all the usual registries unfit.