Between Cities

The book announces its form in its subtitle: a guided report. Its narrator, F. Wendelin, has travelled between countries for work for over a decade, never staying a full month in one place — a life conducted in departure lounges, night cabins, serviced apartments, and the bars of other people’s cities. What he files is not a plot but an account: one week of that life, recorded with the flat precision of a man taking inventory of himself.

The week, tellingly, begins on a Friday. A framing preface — “Words of a Friend” — hands the account over to the reader and sets its terms: the events correspond, for the most part, to events from a life, insofar as memory did not cloud them. What follows is interior, digressive, and deliberately undramatic. The book warns anyone hoping for drama, tragedy and an epic arc that they will be disappointed — supplying one would falsify the reality of F. Wendelin. The flatness is not a deficit. It is the diagnosis.

“I travelled between countries for work, never staying longer than a month in the same place. That had been my life for over ten years now.”

It is a book about the borderless working life written from inside it: the semiotics of a tie-knot before a meeting, the sociology of an airport queue, the city seen from a taxi window at 5 a.m. — and underneath the surface, quietly, the question of whether a self assembled in transit can be said to be from anywhere at all.

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