The mother is dead, and the adult children gather at the father's house. But what to talk about if not the helpless, the ridiculous, and the out of place in the face of death? How else to speak than in "Auxiliary Verbs of the Heart"? Even though the narrator forbids himself pity in the preface and claims, like Handke, to have become a purely literary machine of memory and formulation since the mother's death – the death evokes in the adult son a grief that manifests itself in a storm of conflicting emotions. The auxiliary verbs are a temple for the mother: highly literary epitaphs pierced with quotes from world literature, from Borges to Pascal to Wittgenstein, which Esterházy refers to in his latest publication, "No Art" – and a moving book.