Rat Man of Paris

Paul West. Collier Books, $0 (179pp) ISBN 978-0-02-026250-3

The Rat Man lives on the streets in Paris, showing rats to passersby, waving banners of a Nazi war criminal; eventually it becomes apparent that he seeks to avenge a Nazi atrocity against his village. PW wrote that West's ""yeasty prose seethes with metaphor that reconstructs Rat Man's warped yet canny logic.'' (November)