. . . "The Anglo-Russian author William Gerhardie was hailed by writers including Graham Greene, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh and others as a genius, and this, his long-out-of-print second novel, is generally acclaimed as his comic masterpiece--not to mention the most influential English novel of the twentieth century, according to William Boyd.It tells the unforgettable tale of an eccentric Belgian f" . . .