A middle-aged university lecturer has an established single man's life. He lives alone in a small flat, has daily work aggravations and affairs. While he continues to be in a relationship with a woman with little common interests, he enjoys existential discussions with a librarian, often over cups of coffee. Within all his discussions rotating around personal freedom, there is an underlying personal ego-centricity. There is a duality of involvement and aloofness when he faces a society that is increasingly content with the mundane. In this, he has, unwittingly, chosen a life of compromise. He is always ready to criticise a passive society losing its passion yet he is indecisive in his own affairs and he ignores what matters to him. His protected life is shattered when he is told that the librarian has died after a period of illness during the period that he had ignored contacting her.
This book portrays an ordinary man with an ordinary life enjoying his daily discourse vacillating between the mundane and the sublime; a man with misconceptions about himself and his relations with the women in his life.
