A love story, a crime novel, a philosophical novel, a Jewish family saga. Leo Singer, a philosophy student and son of Jewish parents who emigrated to Brazil during the Nazi era, returns to Vienna with his parents in the early 1960s. He falls in love with the Jewish woman Judith Katz. She is meant to be his muse in his attempt to impose a philosophical system on the world one last time. Judith's death reveals to him the secret of life - but is she really dead? Life, in any case, takes the most astonishing turns.