St. Mark's Bookshop

In Self-Portrait Abroad, our narrator—a Belgian author much like Toussaint
himself—travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the
exotic: With his usual poker face, he keeps up on Corsican gossip in Tokyo
and has a battle of nerves in a butcher shop in Berlin; he wins a boules
tournament in Cap Corse, takes in a strip club in Japan's historic Nara,
gets pulled through Hanoi on a cycle rickshaw, and has a chance encounter
on the road from Tunis to Sfax. Tales of a cosmopolitan at home in a
strangely familiar world, Self-Portrait Abroad casts the entire globe in a
cool but playful light, reminding us that, wherever we go,we take our own
eyes with us...