CITY By Alessandro Baricco, Hamish Hamilton, £ 6.99 The literary world hasn't come to a decision yet on whether Alessandro Baricco is 'really a great writer, or...a bluffer'. This is probably because Baricco is an Italian music critic whose novels - three till date - are tapestries woven with memory and strange desires, dreams and the cruellest of nightmares, the pragmatic and the outrageously impossible, the comic and the painfully serious, and above all, the real and the imaginary. Silk, written in 1997, Baricco's first novel, is a love fable set in Japan in the 1860s. It is about a Frenchman in search of silkworms' eggs who falls in love with a warlord's concubine. In Ocean Sea, a historical yet timeless tale set in some European shore, a painter, a woman pining for her lover, a young princess, a seaman and several others are all guests at the Almayer Inn, where their lives intersect repeatedly to create a virtual narrative maze. City is an experiment of sorts - with form rather than content, like a modern-day Tristram Shandy. There are several narratives, each written in a distinctive style, which cross one another almost randomly. These accommodate a Western in progress, a white underdog boxer training to be a champion, a giant and a mute going about sticking chewing gum on the keyboards of ATM machines, a comic strip agency taking a poll on whether a character should be killed off, and several professors roaming the twilight zone between the intellect and madness. All these happen around or in the minds of Gould (a boy-genius whose father is in the army and mother in an asylum) and his governess, 30-year-old Shatzy Shell. Shatzy carries a tape-recorder, into which she dictates the Western she's making, and photographs of Walt Disney and Eva Braun in her bag which says 'Save the Planet Earth from Painted Toenails'. Gould was discovered at the age of six to have an IQ of 180. 'At the age of 11, he had graduated in theoretical physics, with work on the solution of the Hubbard model in two dimensions.' At the graduation ceremony, the rector said, 'You, Gould, are a billiard ball, and you run between the cushions of knowledge tracing the infallible trajectory that will let you, with our joy and sympathy, roll gently into the pocket of fame and success...and the name of that pocket is the Nobel Prize.' Shatzy becomes Gould's governess after she is fired from CRB, the company which had been publishing the adventures of Ballon Mac, a dentist by day and fighter of evil by night. Shatzy and Gould are loners, each clueless about the other's curious preoccupations and imaginary worlds. But they strike a funny companionship, traipsing through the town in search of a trailer, only to realize that they need a car to attach it to, or going into McDonald's to find that for everything they want to eat, they must take something they don't want free of cost. But before the narrative of Gould and Shatzy can get anywhere, it is interrupted, and often completely taken over, by several others. Most prominent among these is Shatzy's Western, presided over by the 63-year-old twin Dolphin sisters. This leads up to the solving of the riddle of a gigantic clock, in a town where time stopped 34 years ago. There is also the story of Larry Gorman's boxing matches in the backdrop of deceit, betrayal and pride, which Gould spins out only in the confines of the lavatory. There's also Professor Mondrian Kilroy, whose subjects of research range from Monet's Waterlilies to intellectual honesty, which, by the way, he thinks is an oxymoron. Like Monet's paintings, Baricco's novel too is impressionistic. Ann Goldstein's translation conveys his linguistic brilliance and eccentricity with ease. City is a gallery of freaks, even though the exhibits are quite harmless. Navigating City is not an easy task. No one lives happily ever after - Shatzy, in fact, dies. Emotions like happiness are not streets Baricco's citizens tread.