Sindbad is an autumnal amorist, a lover of women who, in their turn, adore him because he is the perfect lover. In fact he is so perfect that he is practically immortal. Even death cannot prevent him revisiting his old lovers. In this collection of stories about him he first appears as a child at the time of his first romance which is accompanied by the drowning of an ugly hunchbacked fellow-student of his at the seminary. In the second story he dies, though we are given to understand that he is close on three hundred years old. Throughout the subsequent stories we see him in old age or as a ghost after death engaging with a variety of women, most of whom are already in the autumn of their years. There is an elegiac yet ironic lightness of voice in Krúdy that conjures up both Proust and Marquez. Sindbad’s world is that of the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire as seen from its romantic, slightly dusty provinces. Sindbad is boy, gentleman-rake and ancient rolled into one. It is impossible to tell whether his lovers are projections of his desire or he of theirs.

His most constant love, nicknamed Monkey, is both his sternest critic and his tenderest admirer. Like him she weighs her cynicism and hopes against each other and continues to float in the intoxicating air of intense but light emotions which she and Sindbad recognise as light. The awareness of his own weightlessness is the deeply melancholic aspect of Sindbad. Drifting is so much his natural mode that we are not surprised when he rises from his own grave to seduce the daughter of a woman he had previously seduced, or when he appears at the window of an ex-lover with a ghostly band of musicians. He is, in effect, his own dream. He retreats for a while to a country cottage, watches the pleasure boats and the passing train and immediately he is an attendant catering to a beautiful Romanian passenger. Another time he contemplates the dead, the suicides, the despairing lovers drowned in the river and feels the terrible shudder of his own death. Some women disdain him, others imprison him, but all forgive him and none of them forgets him.

The stories are not linked chronologically, as, given Sindbad’s own lack of fixity, any of them could have happened at any time. The development is one of mood rather than event, a constant darkening and deepening of the experience of desire. The writing itself entangles you and moves you through scenes almost unnoticeably as in this, the first paragraph of the first story.

Once upon a damp and moonlit night a man with greying hair was watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops. Somewhere in this monastery at Podolin, he was thinking, there is, or was, an old painting, showing a shaggy-haired figure with a wild upcurled moustache, a thick beard, red as a woman’s hair, two big round eyes with elongated pale blue pupils and a complexion as ruddy as the colour on a white tablecloth when light passes through a full wine glass on a sunny winter noon. This man was Prince Lubomirski.