An dying old writer leaves behind her messy, unpublished manuscript, which is short a few pages. A film director, a cameraman, and a script girl, come to film a documentary on her, are determined to find the missing parts. But the old lady is not alone: the young woman she used to be is nearby, as well as an odd man who was her father, and a red-hatted boy who was her friend in the summers, a certain Hans who never says more than a sentence at a time.
As usual, Anne Serre writes a novel full of tricks. In her book, as W.G. Sebald said of Robert Walser: "The narrator never really knows if he is in the middle of the street or in the middle of a sentence."