It was a messy day. This is a simple story. A scandal and a surprising death in the upper echelons of Zurich society force a young servant to piece together the fragments of the tale. However, his memory is unreliable – and so nothing is as it initially seems in this intricately eerie and delightfully lighthearted novel. It was Christian, the servant of the Hobbs family of lawyers, who found the corpse in the garden pavilion next to the bloodstained chaise longue. Years later, he looks back and tries to understand how the catastrophe could have happened. Memories of his youth in Feldkirch, Austria, seemingly randomly intrude into his reconstruction: four brilliantly provincial boys recite Zweig and Hesse by the summer lake in fabulous suits and have their own unique theory about curly-haired women.