MOCKING DESIRE

This intermittently entertaining Slovenian novel recounts the adventures of Gregor Gradnik, a writer from that land relocated in New Orleans as a visiting professor of creative writing. As Gregor dutifully helps research his sponsor’s encyclopedic work on the subject of melancholy, his own professional and aesthetic gravity are mischievously overturned by the variously tangled lives of several acquaintances from the Queen City’s colorful lower depths, and particularly by the seductive energies of Mardi Gras. The book's overlong, but Gregor is in spite of himself an engagingly unlikely innocent abroad, and his embarrassed plunge into the savory grit of ordinary life is a trip well worth taking.