With this epistolary novel, Tabucchi renews an illustrious tradition, although breaking its codes and perverting the genre. Little by little we realize that something "does not work" in all these letters: the landscape shifts before our eyes, times turn upside down, as if the letters arrived early or late in the very message they convey; as if the destinies of men, as required by the Myth, were still not found. The whole is an extraordinary journey through human passions - love as an illusory central point? tenderness, sensuality, nostalgia, seventeen letters from male characters to as many female figures, poor monologuing voices, eager for an answer that will never come. And a distant and implacable female voice, overflowing with sorrow.