What is more powerful for measuring the success or failure of a person's life - memory or imagination? This novel seeks to find the answer through the moving life story of an old man in Bulgaria: a story which poignantly reflects that country's history of repression and exploitation. A book for the reader who likes to grapple with the bigger questions of life.
When his mind is particularly aware, Ulrich can sense the great black ocean of forgotten things, and, ignoring his beginning and end, he casts off into it. Everything he has known has drained, over time, from the actual world into this ocean, and he is blissful in the endless oblivion.
