In the early 1990's the social omnipotence that held up the Iron Curtain failed; the weak, confused, and fossilized governments-still armed for cold war and total control-could no longer fill the vacuum. Ellipsis follows a fictional Eastern European country through the genesis point of its new history. Better angels of freedom scrap against the worse of law and order in a society astonished by events and unaccustomed to searching for its own equilibrium. Such grand events are made up of less grand bits of private histories as well: simple threads of love and trust and savage disappointment; small, sometimes accidental acts of courage; awesome ridiculousness. The ruling class must create itself out of institutions forty years disconnected from reality, and by force of will alone, try to care. It discovers what it is to govern a free people with a perpetually flimsy mandate full of contradictions: powerful and weak, greedy and honest, wise and clueless, lucid and completely nuts, and brave.