The protagonist and narrator, Leo Carver, is a perceptive figure who takes a tragic approach to life through an excess of alcohol, sex, and parties, even though he knows his struggle against the void is condemned to failure. Looking for something to give meaning to his life, he sets off on a journey in search of lost memories: the clues he needs to clear up the death of a young woman poet with whom he was in love thirty years ago. Unable to retain his recent memories, he forces himself to write down everything in a journal to try to reconstruct key moments in his life by means of contact with places and people from the past. But his deformed vision of reality forever imposing itself, giving rise to a different story and a subjective reality that takes over what he is trying to do, and creating a parallel scenario that is more real if it fits in Leo's tortured mind.