In this story Aristotelis Nikolaidis, psychiatrist and prolific novelist and poet, relates how a certain individual slowly vanishes from view, a process that becomes strangely contagious. Starting with the narrator, who has doubts about his own identity and even the reality of his thoughts and memories, the contagion spreads to other characters and to the narration itself. The hero's odyssey is a descent into hell in which reality becomes a snare trapping the wanderer in a state of absolute clandestinity; finally it reaches the very frontiers of paranoia to reflect starkly all the incoherence and derisiveness of the late twentieth century.

The Greek version of this novel, first published in 1975, is now in its fourth edition. In 1976 the work received Greece's first National Book Award for a novel.