Breathless in Paris: Memoirs of a Book Thief by Alessandro Tota

We are dropped at the centre of a dreamy 1950s Paris, full of flaneurs, delinquents, raconteurs, and runaways. Our gloomy hero Daniel Brodin is introduced to us while he's attempting to steal a book from a bookshop. It's the kind of opening you expect from a film by Jean-Luc Godard, not a novel. We stay with Brodin largely, as he flits in and out of the ostentatious artistic circles of 20th century Paris - his misadventures providing us a glimpse into the ridiculously inflated and self-important bubble in which the bourgeois of the day lived.

Last week's recommendation, Yellowface, was about an author stealing another author's work and passing it off as her own. Although that novel and Memoirs of a Book Thief are set in vastly different universes, something similar happens in this one too. When Brodin is invited to a literary evening at the Café Serbier - a place frequented by writers and publishers (including friends of the great Jean-Paul Sartre, we are told!) - consumed by his deep desire to be accepted as one of them, he plagiarizes from a book of Italian poetry he had been reading and recites a poem from it which the room instantly eats up. Thus, in some way, these two books became companion pieces inside my head.

The line between genius and tomfoolery is often so thin in these circuits - in one scene our protagonist is praised by another character because he had "unsettled the entire Parisian intelligentsia" and "revealed them for what they are: utter imbeciles!" But one doesn't need to time travel back to Paris for that. One short trip to any of the major art/literature/film festivals around this country can also make anyone aware of such posey duplicities.

Memoirs of a Book Thief is like a heist novel but of ideas - the immersive art by Pierre Van Hove is all in black and white but Alessandro Tota paints his characters with so many colours that you feel as if you've stepped into a kaleidoscope as you read on.