Tout est Possible

“Tout est Possible” (Everything is Possible) tells the story of one of the most astonishing scams in history. In 1925, Victor Lustig (1890–1947), a professional swindler of Austro-Hungarian origin who arrived in Paris from the United States, found inspiration while leafing through a newspaper. An article discussed the deterioration of the Eiffel Tower and the high cost of its maintenance for the city council. The piece ended with an ironic question: “Will we have to sell the Eiffel Tower?”
Lustig did not hesitate. That sentence shaped a plan that would become one of the boldest deceptions of the twentieth century: to sell the Eiffel Tower… and persuade someone to buy it.
Fascinated by this story, Maite Caramés begins an investigation that leads her to wander through Paris following Lustig’s traces. Among archives, locations, and fragments of memory, she reconstructs his story and the Paris of the 1920s in a photographic series that emerged almost serendipitously: while watching the tower on the verge of disappearing into the city’s fog.
One hundred years after Lustig’s feat, Caramés discovers that the most photographed monument in the world was indeed once on the brink of disappearance… and that there is no object that cannot be looked at, photographed, and discovered once again.
 
The book blends elements of film noir and detective fiction within the subtle interval between reality and imagination, while Lustig himself recalls—in the first person—the memory of those glorious days.