Between World Wars I and II, three expatriate Americans attempt to reconstruct a vision of the fractured Europe they’ve been forced to occupy; meanwhile, in the near future, a nameless narrator wanders the desolation of the United States, looking for (and dreading to find) any sign of life. But where the normal historical novel treats the past like the present, The Scenarists of Europe deals in the actual form of the past— corrupted files and incomplete documents, static tableaux and broken images, between which we must imagine the connections—and, in the process, constructs a dreamlike critique of the transmission of history, the empire-building ambitions of modernism, and the ahistorical wilderness of the world’s last superpower.
