An experiment in what the author terms "speculative history," this novel tracks the movements of a man haunted by the spirit of his deceased mother and dogged by the notion that Astoria—the Italian neighborhood in Queens where his mother grew up in the 1920s—is the true capital of the world. In 1986, two years after his mother's death, the narrator travels from Paris to New York to Rome, unable to escape the shadow of Napoleon, the historical figure he now associates with his mother. Weaving theory upon theory in an attempt to break the hold of these visions, he finds that she represents the fury, rage, and unappeased desire of migration and the displaced people left in its wake.