A novel that is a piece of music - the music of life, of death - but that is first and foremost a novel that defies both time and place. It is the account of a civil war fought some time in the past, and of the living conditions of the population under a totalitarian regime in Georgia in the former USSR. A story in which humankind loses its meaning and tries to recover it by justifying chance … Once time has been called into question, dreams lose their raison d’être because of a new, unheard of interweaving of reality and imagination. All the characters in the opera the narrator is striving to write are in fact dead, but they still die in the opera then pass away later on in the everyday life of Tbilisi, which is punctuated by their burials and their funeral ceremonies. The narrator himself does not escape this temporal confusion, even if he cannot be - for good reason – the final character of an act that cannot now be concluded.