The ingenious comic novel named one of the “best books of 2004” by The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Baltimore Sun.

In The Story of My Baldness, Viennese philosophy student Marek van der Jagt tells the story of his quest for l’amour fou. Van der Jagt introduces a host of unforgettable characters and weaves a web of shameful secrets in this novel that uses Vienna the way Kafka used Prague—as the (strangely familiar) landscape where the narrator’s obsessions are given free rein.

“Van der Jagt’s dysfunctional family may be the most wondrous and most marvelously entertaining in recent memory. . . . He looses the spirit of J.P. Donleavy—and more—once again upon the world. Wonderful.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Marek’s voice . . . is what gives his romantic misadventures (first kiss, deflowering, anxiety about physical endowment) their fun air of droll farce.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Dark, funny and penetrating.”

—The New York Observer

“Archly tongue in cheek.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This whimsical novel, written pseudonymously by a Dutch novelist, masquerades as the confessions of an Austrian philosophy student . . . [who] decides to assert his existence by pursuing l’amour fou.”

—The New Yorker