What drives so many Africans to flee their homeland and migrate to the North? What is the price of this uprooting? What does the proximity of people from other cultures, whom we pass on the street or who travel alongside us on the subway, suggest to us? Set in contemporary Africa, where tradition struggles to resist the inexorable advance of modernity, this novel narrates the trials of a young African man facing existential challenges such as love and the pursuit of well-being and freedom. In this solidly constructed, literary work, the author departs from the autobiographical style of his previous books to give life to characters who move like shadows through history. Ndongo lucidly explores the yearning to overcome the vital and cultural contradictions of an African who, in search of his destiny, ventures beyond the land of his birth. Because of its high literary quality and the excellence of its prose, The Meter is a work of universal value in which there is no room for indifference and in which, whether we like it or not, we are also protagonists.