Running Away

"An unnamed man travels to Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, but finds himself increasingly unmoored from his life and identity. Caught in a jet-lag reality, he stumbles from adventure to adventure, allowing himself to be led not by sense or instinct but by the onrush of experience, until a call from home jars him back into his life, with all of its own confusions." "In Running Away, the Chaplinesque slapstick of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's acclaimed early works The Bathroom and Camera is replaced by an ever-unfolding fabric of coincidences and misapprehensions, both particularly modern and utterly real. The mature Toussaint shows himself to be no less ingenious an inventor of existential dilemmas, but with a new, surprising tenderness, and a deepened concern for the inexpressible immediacy and sensuality of human experience." --Book Jacket.