"It leaves books and enters your body, and to feel at peace again, it must return to books once more--that is why we write."

In the early 1970s, protest movements in Paris, Rome, and Berlin, born in the wake of the '68 riots, were all more or less asking the same question about whether they should resort to armed, underground resistance. While most in France decided not to, the same was not true in Germany or Italy, but all three countries experienced a decade of violence. A witness to these events, our narrator awakens to desire and political awareness–which are one and the same–but when his turn comes to play in the bigger game, the hopes of his elders will be shattered by the walls of repression or murderous dead-ends.