Gregor Samsa is a washed-up director in his late fifties, a battered man in a battered society, wandering through temples of consumption and brothels to kill time. In the process, he reflects on his botched life. The fact that he has squandered his potential as a cultural creator does not exactly contribute to his happiness. With scorn and mockery, he critiques his memories, his false friends and companions, his phony successes, and naive ambitions from the past, while writing his own very dark cultural history. It is a sarcastic reckoning with the meaninglessness of the media and consumer society, an unrestrained, provocative novel that, with drastic humor, also tells of an insatiable longing for beauty.