The narrator looks back on the muddle of his life as a literary translator. He dreams of finding literary fame while toiling away at his translation of an important but dauntingly bleak Peruvian novel.

At one point he earns a living by working for a large multinational company whose hidebound hierarchy infuriates him. With his professional ambitions frustrated, his dead-end jobs take him London and Lima, Paris and Madrid, Leiden and back to London. His edgy relationships with friends, family, colleagues and lovers seem to go nowhere.

The story is told through a mosaic of interlinked episodes that together create a picture of the narrator's bumpy road to maturity. Finally, he realises, painfully, that he, a translator, is prone to `misreadings': of his own strengths and weaknesses, of the women in his life, of the viability of his translation career, of the options open to him.

Can a chance meeting in a Dutch town with a key figure from his past bring some much-desired clarity?