The essays collected in this volume may take the author -- a former architect and publisher -- to such far-flung locations as Moscow, Jakarta, Sicily, and London, but these aren't the methodical musings of your average travel writer. Instead, for Buzzi these various places function as springboards from which he launches all manner of metaphorical flips and somersaults. For example, "Chekhov in Sondrio" represents Buzzi's take on Moscow. He is obliging enough to furnish a few contemporary snapshots, describing Lenin's tomb and the Easter-egg-like colors of the local currency. But the real subject of his essay is 19th-century Russia -- the Russia of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy -- which his ample supply of quotations, anecdotes, and trivia restores, quite miraculously, to life. There are short, witty riffs on the era's most popular foods (cabbage and vodka), and an aside on the chamber pot, which was referred to euphemistically as "Yakov Andreyich -- that is, James, the son of Andrew." Buzzi also fills in the reader on Chekhov's pet names for his wife, culminating with "my little sperm whale" -- an bit of trivia I'd hate to part with, even if it fails to illuminate the age.

Elsewhere Buzzi's method is the same: he relies on his stockpile of sensations and squirreled-away facts to evoke a place, or more to the point, his experience of it. And like any epicure with a brain in his head, Buzzi cherishes his experiences all the more because he knows that they, too, are bound to disappear.

-- James Marcus