Roger Monnerat writes in reverse: with the wealth of the world in view, he keeps his existence in the world and the stories of his own origins alive. Like a band of thoughts that meanders through his wandering narrative, Roger Monnerat's elegant prose draws from the reservoir of his knowledge, gliding around the globe and through history, demanding a pause: it takes us from the present of a Japanese tsunami back to American-French atomic bomb policy and German intelligence in the post-war period, from the literature of Johann Peter Hebel and Elias Canetti to Syria's torture chambers, from cave paintings in Northern Italy and the hint of a kinship with the naturalist and evolution researcher Adolf Portmann back to "mountains of butter in a sea of milk" in his native Switzerland – as an original observer, Roger Monnerat has made a name for himself in his extensive body of work.