Riding his bicycle – a model called the ‘Odyssey’ – along Europe’s longest cycle path called, suitably enough, ‘La Vélodyssée’, a middle aged man sets off on a thousand kilometre ride through the dunes an pine forests of France’s Atlantic coast.
With only the ghost of the sixteenth century philosopher – Michel de Montaigne – and a battered copy of the famous Essais for company, he fights off oversized ants, pass through lands recently devastated by wildfires, skirt a nuclear missile site, and spend time in a naturist resort…
…all this, even as he faces the rumbling thunder of his own existential crisis.
With friends facing their mortality, his own body showing signs of wear, with his children all grown up and gone, he must find reasons to keep peddling in a world bedelied by climate catastrophe, war, and pandemic.
What use now is all the philosophy of the ages? Where on earth is his sense of humour?
And if not Michel, who then can can save him from drowning in such cruel seas?
