In this wildly inventive page-turner, a feckless narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply and go astray; his employer is asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival stories against his will. A story about the sadness of the world and of the inadequacy of language and storytelling to describe and understand it.