Sensing that death is near, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who has spent much of his life in exile in Argentina, decides to return to his native Hungary in the hope of reuniting with his teenage love. But his return sows confusion in the town, many of whose inhabitants receive him as a rich benefactor capable of saving them from doom, when in reality he has squandered his fortune in the casinos of Buenos Aires, a fact that provokes a wave of rumors and misunderstandings that are increasingly extravagant, in which even the politicians and journalists of the region participate. Krasznahorkai virtuosically weaves together the voices of one and the other, giving rise to a choral novel as masterful as it is apocalyptic that many have considered visionary in contemporary European narrative.