Exquisite Corpse — Robert Irwin

This “off-beat, brisk and darkly comic” historical novel about an artist's romantic obsession with his muse is “consistently clever and inventive.”(The New York Times)
 
Set in London, Paris, and Munich in the 1940s and 1950s, Exquisite Corpse is, like Robert Irwin's cult classic, The Arabian Nightmare, a novel about the strange and ever-morphing powers of the imagination. At once a love story, a mystery, and an investigation into the ideas of surrealism, it concerns Casper, a mediocre surrealist painter living in London, who becomes passionately fixated on a woman so ordinary she appears exotic to him. Until she vanishes, leading Casper on an obsessive quest to find her that is more absurd than any piece of art he could imagine.
 
“Irwin has fashioned a devilishly clever plot, masked it with an eccentric cast and a narrator of dubious authority, then enhanced the work with a prose style that is intelligent and crisp in its execution.” -- Publishers Weekly
 
“Intelligent and fraught with narcissistic musings, offbeat philosophies, Freudian analysis, hypnotism, and even an orgy, this book holds interest primarily through its central mystery and dizzying blur of fact and fiction.” -- Library Journal
 
“A picaresque nightmare, a sinister shell game, an addled odyssey along the graying edges of the psyche -- Exquisite Corpse is all of these things.” -- San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Irwin's novel about English surrealism is funny and profound and hugely satisfying” -- A. S. Byatt, Sunday Times