The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in a rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, and he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life?