Closing time in a cafe. Paris, about 1935.

Source:
Paris en Images, copyright Gaston Paris / Roger-Viollet:
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Gaito Gazdanov's Paris / 49

Like Gazdanov's other novels, Night Roads is a psychological novel, in this case focused on the taxi driver's interior life which is coloured by three preoccupations.

One of these preoccupations is the temptation to pick away at sore places in his own psyche – his regret for the lost world of his childhood, his despair at having to live in exile, and the dark fantasies about murder and suicide that occasionally invade his consciousness.

Another preoccupation is "this insatiable desire – which in these last years has never left me – to comprehend if possible the destinies of strangers." [20]

It's this desire that populates Night Roads with so many lively portraits of customers, acquaintances and strangers whom the taxi driver meets in the course of his night shift.

From among these portraits five special "destinies" gradually emerge: the alcoholic philosopher nicknamed Platon (Plato); the aging courtesan Raldi; the shallow young prostitutes Suzanne and Alice; and the taxi driver's infinitely adaptable fellow emigre Fedortchenkow.