The Deserter

the long version

"Returned from the ravages of war, met with a city that offers him only despair, a young man finds himself caught between two opposed worlds - the ordered but empty everyday life of "schedules and obligations," and the hellish chaos of the city's underside, a dark world of brutality and vice. Gripped with a restless passion for perfection, haunted by a brief and idealized experience of love, the hero of this poetic, experimental novel lives out in a modern context that most universal of myths, the descent into the underworld to experience initiations and ordeals, returning with new understanding to the upper world."--