"Andre de Vries explores a city and country in perpetual search of an identity, still showing the scars of the Counter-Reformation, peopled by the 'Spaniards of the North'. He discovers a capital on the fault-line between Latin and Germanic cultures, with its improbable hybrid languages. A place ruled by the spirit of zwanze, 'self-mockery and derision', a city so down-to-earth they had to invent surrealism."--BOOK JACKET.