Made in Tanganyika

On his fortieth birthday, conchologist Martin Sutter abandons his tedious routine and purchases a strange television set that should not exist. The screen shows not programs but a luminous beach on an alien world, its shores strewn with shells of impossible beauty and structure. Sutter becomes obsessed. Each night he watches, each night he reaches through the glass to claim specimens more exquisite than anything in his collection. But his roommate Lucien Travail shares his passion for shells, and as the specimens grow more valuable, trust erodes. Suspicion curdles into something darker: who will control this gateway, these treasures, this other world? When Sutter stages a confrontation to frighten his rival, the joke turns catastrophic. Both men tumble through the screen and into the realm beyond the shells, where the beach waits eternally and escape may be impossible. Jacobi writes with wry, unsettling humor about the collector's dangerous love affair with the unattainable, the way obsession transforms beauty into poison.