A Man Who Knows

Maurice Lesca is fifty-seven--older, not much wiser, and painfully comical in his failures. Though educated as a doctor, he's a ne'er-do-well who milks family and friends for money and lives in poverty with his widowed sister. When he encourages a divorcÉe to extort money from her ex-husband, Lesca sows the seeds of distrust that will disrupt his world. But Lesca is a survivor; he will always survive in the modern city. The last of Bove's major novels, A Man Who Knows is the most mature example of his celebrated style.

"Bove wants to explore an inner emptiness to which his maniac protagonist gives the reader access. Capricious, mendacious, incapable of consistent thought or action, Bove's hero is a Pascalian paranoid who seems suspended above an abyss of human misery, one as much metaphysical as physical." -- World Literature in Review