“Madera was as heavy,” Perec begins. “I grabbed him by the armpits and went backwards down the stairs to the laboratory.”This is Gaspard Winckler speaking, expert forger of Old Master paintings, who has murdered the boss of his rarefied art mafia after 16 years and is now beginning to unravel the reasons, for us and for himself. By the end of the first paragraph he is barricaded in his studio (or laboratory), in hiding from Madera’s henchmen, who may (or may not; he can’t decide) kill him.This is an extraordinary book, in which crimes happen almost off-stage, as in Greek drama: bloody murder, trafficking in fake treasures, betrayals, nail-biting escapes and flight; while very little actually happens before our eyes. We spend the whole of it with the nar