Another Man’s City covers barely more than a single weekend, describing what the character K experiences, feels, and thinks as he finds his world slightly (and then increasingly) out of whack.
As the opening headings suggest, the story closely tracks unfolding events, down to the exact time as K progresses through his days:
SATURDAY
7 a.m.
(POWER ON)
And as the parenthetical ‘Power on’ might suggest, this isn’t entirely an everyday story, on any level. Exactly how far those levels reach isn’t immediately clear, but it won’t come as a surprise that the book’s closing words are:
(POWER OFF)
For all the precision, Another Man’s City finds K in a bit of a daze. It begins when his alarm goes off at 7 in the morning — on a Saturday, when it shouldn’t. His memories of the previous evening are hazy, and include a whole block of lost time — and he seems to have forgotten his phone somewhere along the way. Small details are wrong, too: he wakes up naked, despite never having slept without his pajamas his entire married life, for example, and his aftershave — V, whose: “scent defined him” — has inexplicably been replaced by aftershave Y. There’s something off about his wife, too and all sorts of other small and larger details. Adding injury to confusion, his daughter’s puppy bites him.
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