Michel Sarr has irrevocably lost his past. A piece of film with a hypnotic female face is his only compass in a surreal drift from Los Angeles with its sandy highways through Paris, lit only by the lights of street fires, to Venice, where bicycle races are held in the dry canals. And if Michel longs to regain his memory, then his grandfather Adolphe Sarr, a former prodigy of silent cinema, runs to the memory of how in the 1920s he filmed the seemingly irretrievably lost masterpiece “The Death of Marat”...

For the first time in Russian - the debut novel of the author of "Amnesiascope" and "The Sea Appeared at Midnight", perhaps the brightest start to a writing career in American literature of the late 20th century.