Nooteboom has the rare ability to create adventure from his travels. […] A great capacity [from which] this extraordinary book emerged. "
Péter Esterházy

Being and appearance confuse their limits in this short novel, an intelligent and beautiful reflection on literary creation.

A writer who has not written fiction for a long time, while talking to another writer about his work, creates two characters - a doctor and a colonel - on whose story he is working. From here several evocations of the characters emerge that will emerge from the nonexistence of him to take shape as Dr. Stefan Ficev and Colonel Georgiev Liuben. Readers will know some aspects of Dr. Ficev, as well as the ideas of Colonel Liuben, reader of Schopenhauer. This story will be intertwined both with the doubts of the writer and some of his encounters with his colleague.

"The colonel falls in love with the doctor's wife" is a phrase that anticipates a world that only the imagination of the writer can turn into something more tangible than reality itself. Aren't fictional characters more real than many of the people in the real world? How are two Bulgarians from 1879 suddenly in Rome in 1979? The writer and the reader evade reality and enter fiction. The characters come to life every time someone reads a story or thinks about them.