La invención de Tristan

In 2005, at the age of thirty-three and after a meteoric literary career, the writer Tristan Egolf committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in a Pennsylvania town. But who was Tristan Egolf? What led him to make that decision? His story is told by Zachary Crane, a young New Yorker wandering through Paris who knows nothing about Egolf until the day he finds one of his books. Intrigued, he sets out to investigate the life of this American writer who, penniless, with a manuscript under his arm (which he constantly rewrote), arrived in Paris. There, Egolf meets a young woman with whom he falls in love; she is the daughter of a French writer, Patrick Modiano, whose books and importance he is unaware of. When Modiano sends the manuscript to the Gallimard publishing house, the literary merit dispels any doubts, and the work is published. Thus, from Paris to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from the labyrinthine corridors of a publishing house to a literary agent's office, from the family's grief after Egolf's death to the harsh realities of the publishing industry, Zachary, the narrator, becomes a literary detective and reconstructs a destiny. A destiny where everything is true, yet everything simultaneously seems like a novel.