Axel Gold was jinxed. Germans bombed him, the British starved him and his father abandoned him. As a man, his true love cuckolds him and he seems doomed to spend his life seeking truth and beauty on a planet run by deceit and corruption. Only in midlife does a long-suppressed memory free him to take the world as he finds it, and to profit by it. Axel and George were childhood buddies. One becomes a journalist, the other survives Vietnam to become a filmmaker. It takes an Argentine beauty named Molly to set the friendship asunder. Lush, lusty and politically incorrect-an irreverent, rollicking tale of the resilience of the human spirit and triumph of the underdog.