In the winter of 1933 without the slightest fanfare, the American comedian Harpo Marx pitched up in Le Havre with his harp following a promotional tour of the Soviet Union with the illustrious Marx Brothers. It is generally accepted that it was this ‘caviar tour’ – no doubt intended as much to win a new Russian audience as to contribute to the thawing of diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR – which brought him to France, but thereafter accounts of this trip vary markedly…

Like a Marx Brothers film rife with madcap invention, Fabio Viscogliosi’s own account reads like a philosophical tale – a paperback odyssey of the great silent clown of American cinema who for a time seems to have become an amnesiac vagabond wandering the byways of France.