Content Warning: The source material contains references to suicidal ideation, gore, and cannibalism, and uses outdated language regarding sexual orientation.

The novel opens with Kochan’s possibly imaginary memory of his own birth. Early in his childhood, adults try to convince him that this memory is impossible, but they lose resolve when faced with his quiet rigidity. As an adult, Kochan thinks over the memory again and realizes several ways in which he has likely contrived it—namely, that he remembers the reflection of sunlight on water when he was born at night. He insists that, even though the memory makes no logical sense, he is still able to believe it, even as an adult.

Kochan describes the family dynamic he was born into, which his grandfather’s recent loss of status burdens and disrupts. His mother is frail when he is born, and he is smaller than average, with blond hair that his parents wash with olive oil to turn it black. On the 49th day after his birth, his grandmother takes him to her sickroom to keep him safe, as his mother and father live on the second floor of their house. Despite many efforts to keep him protected from harm, Kochan has early brushes with death when he falls down the stairs as an infant and, at four, has his first bout of what was believed to be chronic autointoxication—a now-discredited but at the time widely popular diagnosis based on the belief that food can rot within the digestive system, poisoning the individual.