The novel revolves around several multilayered, elaborately linked narratives. The first, set against the backdrop of 1970s East Berlin, is that of an emotionally tormented young Hungarian writer who is enmeshed in an amorous triad with a German poet and an aging temperamental actress. The second narrative is a novel the narrator is composing about a turn-of-the-century German aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions and hypersensitivity mirror those of his creator. A final voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's death, offers his own perspective on their friendship and on the events that shaped their lives.

With a hypnotic attention to sensuous detail conveyed in a prose as lush as it is elegantly precise, Peter Nadas's work is certain to endure both as a brilliant inquiry into the varieties of sexual, artistic, and political passion, and as an important moral expression of the public and private soul of twentieth-century Europe.