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 and 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, passes through lands recently devastated by wildfires, skirts a nuclear missile site, and spends time in a naturist resort…all this, even as he faces the rumbling thunder of his own existential crisis.
Where on earth is his sense of humour? And if not Michel, who then can save him from drowning in such cruel seas?
