Matei Vishniec is a Romanian-French writer, poet, and, in the critics’ opinion, the most significant playwright after Eugène Ionesco. He is the author of twenty plays staged in more than 30 countries. In the novel “The Panic Syndrome in the City of Lights,” Vishniec guides the reader through a complex plot maze woven from many diverging stories. The backdrop of the entire narrative is Paris—but not the city known to everyone from tourist guidebooks. It is Vishniec’s own “Paris,” where he reveals mysterious places unknown to tourists, and where he talks closely with great shades of the past—like on the real Champs-Élysées.