As stubborn, as surprising, as artful as life in its refusal to conform to a particular literary genre, Marcel B nabou's book is at once a memoir and a novel, a confession and a reflection on the prerogatives and imperatives of writing one's story. At its center, forever alluring and elusive, is the beautiful and ethereal Tamara, the exact incarnation of our narrator's most enduring fantasy--a femme fatale for the lover of form. Who precisely our...