«Better to have a poetics without a work than a work without poetry», thinks Matías Parra, a student of letters obsessed with punctuality, who goes through life collecting dying cells -programs of art exhibitions, advertising brochures, pieces of graffiti, abandoned notebooks ... - to compose a piece of written art whose shape is still unknown. His literary search is interrupted one afternoon, when he runs into an ad in the newspaper that is presented as a call: "secretaries are sought for reading club. Last vacancies ». This is how he meets Professor Baltazar Boeuf, who welcomes him as his protege and tells him about the ambitious Babel Project. Boeuf is a novel that is written as it progresses. It is a journey through language, art, literature and life itself: that which is lived in metaphors, in a city that is shown as an illegible book. It is a journey propitiated by boredom and the cravings for self-knowledge.