"The world burns within us, not outside of us." Richard Hieck, research assistant at the astronomical observatory and candidate for a doctorate in Mathematics, has engraved in blood and fire these words that his father – being mysterious and always absent – ​​told him when he was little, words that encrypt an enigma to which this scientist , in love with the clarity and solidity of mathematics, is unable to escape.

Richard maintains a special relationship with two of his brothers: Otto, vitalist, bohemian and frustrated painter, and Susanne, who has been preparing for years to enter a convent. All three seem to embody, ultimately, three ways of approaching the mystery of the world, three searches for truth: art, religion and pure knowledge. However, Hieck's respect and fascination for mathematics also do not seem to quench a deeper, more secret thirst, a thirst that love and death (both always striking in the most unforeseen and untimely ways) will increase. Where is life? Where its unfathomable meaning, that "unknown value" that no science can compute, that no knowledge can encompass? At the end, as at the beginning, only the vertigo of existence remains.

With this delightful novel, published in 1933 and hitherto unpublished in our language, Hermann Broch, one of the great European writers of the 20th century, offers us a vision of the academic world that is not exempt from criticism and humor and poses questions (how to reconcile reason and passion?, how to live?) that are still as pressing today as they were in Europe between the wars.