The whole world seems to have belonged to Blaise Cendrars: the steppes of Russia, the jungles of South America, New York, artistic and intellectual Paris between the wars. He knew the best whore-houses in Peking, the opium dens in Marseilles, the richest Mexicans, the poorest fishermen; he directed movies, was a capitalist businessman, a jewel-peddler, a poet, a novelist. Even his losses were gains: though he lost an arm serving in the Foreign Legion during the First World War, he could add to his possessions the war itself and a host of legionaries, among them gypsies who later adopted him as one of their own. He must have thought he could, if not order, at least account for, the entire world in terms of places visited and people met.

The Astonished Man is a kind of heightened memoir: its images, taken from his life, act as mysterious and evocative emblems. There is the wealthy Mexican woman, Paquita, married five or six times, living just outside Paris in 'a château in splendid Louis XIV Baroque', with a 'gold and ebony gondola that brought one to the main gate', who meticulously fashions small waxwork figures of characters from Flaubert and Dickens, teaches Cendrars the complex Aztec alphabet, and gives half her fortune to the Mexican Revolution. There is the beautiful, sharp-witted American virgin, Diana, whom Cendrars rescues when her Buick breaks down in North Africa. There is La Mère, the matriarch of a vast gypsy community, marked by infibulation, yet wife to 14 dispensable husbands. Long after the book has been read one goes on seeing details that are so vivid—a hoard of wild pigs chasing a car in the jungles of Paraguay, a defect in a gypsy's eye 'known in medical terms as a colomba, a defect in the iris in the shape of a keyhole'—that they seem like letters in a rich alphabet (like the letters in the Aztec alphabet) which Cendrars has fashioned to describe an astonishing world.