Luc Sante was born in a Belgian factory town in 1954, into the great gray fog of inertia that was postwar Europe; when he was still very young, his parents emigrated to America. Sante spent most of his childhood being ferried back and forth between these two countries and cultures, spending half his time in each environment and hating both. Sante decided to write The Factory Of Facts as a kind of personal archaeological experiment, an effort to discover exactly which experiences, events, and stimuli created the person he came to be. It's a noble goal; no one can deny that a strange set of cultural and personal factors influences every individual. Unfortunately, examining and pedantically describing every single Belgian one of them doesn't necessarily make for good reading. Sante admits that he has a finely tuned metaphor factory constantly running in his head, and most college graduates will find themselves struggling to recall obscure bits of their education at least once a page in order to better understand the interminable boredom of the author's youth. Sante often complains that Belgium in the '60s was a dull, gray, artificial place; why, then, does he work so hard to slowly and implacably drag the patient reader into that world? For Belgian/American expatriates, there's probably no better autobiographical work. Readers with different interests will find themselves exhausted by the time it's over.