This book consists of a single sentence: An old man, who no longer washes himself and wears several pairs of pants on top of each other, recounts his life to a pretty young lady during a chance encounter, while he picks roses in foreign gardens and promises her flights. He does so unconventionally, as thoughts come to him, chatty and disrespectful, fame-hungry and cunning: "The discourse could be summarized in the formula: The world is what you perceive it to be. Here, it is not necessarily taken more seriously than absolutely required. With sly wit and irony disguised as harmlessness, Hrabals' first-person narrator acquires a freedom that makes him immune, because it is the freedom of the fool." Wolfgang Werth.