Simon Blef, who comes from ‘a small, stifling country without a sea’ in some corner of Europe, has gone to live in the Netherlands. There he has found a wife and hopes he may yet find work. He is making preparations: he carries around a notebook and jots down his thoughts. One day he would like to write a novel, but in the meantime, he records, embellishes, invents, and combines what he sees with what he dreams: the happy, hard-working Dutch, with their seventy-year-old hippies – the ‘superannuated generation of rockers’ – and their new ‘sexless generation,’ as well as the tourists and immigrants from beyond the seven seas.