Five tales, each of which stages an encounter between an acute sensibility and a city. Russian-born Olga Medvedkova reveals something of what may motivate travel curiosity, infatuation, uxorial affection, search for academic knowledge, acquisitiveness and what may lie behind that word, in its forms both loved and loathed: tourism. Writing in French rendered into English by renowned translator Richard Pevear, Olga Medvedkova lends her art-historian s eye to the particularity of place, intimating how every city offers its own specific lure and threat.
