The biographer's tale

""Studying the messiness of life, by writing a biography, is no easy task. In fact, doing nothing by halves, Phineas G. has chosen to write the biography of a biographer. But a whole life is proving difficult to put together, and he is left with a collection of unsolved mysteries, typescripts, bones, marbles, and photographs"--Container."@en
"The story of a disenchanted postgraduate student who decides to study "the messiness of real life" by writing a biography of a great biographer. Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: disconnected type-scripts, bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of photographs. Phineas feels he is hunting shadows: his mind tracks the journeys of his subjects to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science. In the process he also puzzles out his own future - but which woman will guide him out of the labyrinth?"@en