Lilian Faschinger Paarweise: Acht Pariser Episoden (Two by Two: Eight Parisian Interludes) Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, August 2002. 224 pp. ISBN 3-4620-3131-5 Eight characters have sought and found an author in this clever collection of loosely connected interludes in which their lives are consecutively linked. Each episode can be read independently, since each unfolding drama is complete in itself. However, the reader's pleasure stems from the author's skill in carrying each protagonist across into the next one's life, even when the connections are only remote, incidental or indirect. Each of the main characters living in Paris has some sort of psychological affliction; each suffers from a sense of loneliness and isolation, and together they seem to illustrate all the difficulties, the charms and the realities of 21st-century Parisian life - or any metropolitan life for that matter - although Paris does have its own atmosphere. The first episode, for instance, concerns an American in his fifties who depends on the benefits of Feng Shui as they are promised by his dubious consultant. He constantly moves apartment in search of the perfect living environment. The following seven episodes continue this sad search, intricate and always intriguing. A young Hispanic girl who wants to learn to tango finds a pious young man with an Oedipus complex. The next episode explores a darker side of Parisian life, and in each of the eight the mood is compellingly mixed. No one character is more important than the rest. Each has a special role to play and all meet directly or indirectly in the last episode, celebrating the fourteenth of July, the national holiday, which unites, if only in passing, everyone, irrespective nationality, age, gender or profession. The style is ironic, even flippant when occasion requires, but in the last resort deeply serious. The Feng Shui send-up is set against episodes dealing with violence towards women or children, vicious racial hatred and physical attacks, eating disorders, alcoholism, older women and younger men, homosexuality, terrorism and the predicament of migrant workers. In short there seems to be no major contemporary social issue that the author is not prepared to tackle. With touches of La Ronde, of Bridget Jones's Diary, of Sebastian Faulks in melancholy mood, this is an enjoyable and skilful novel, and as up-to-date as tomorrow's Figaro.