Wandering between Paris, Harare and Sydney Michel Besovsky, an academic in his forties, is disgusted with the outcome of a childhood "romance" he had with his maman and dislikes children. He neglects his daughter and devotes himself to experienced lovers. The child's every effort to win her father's heart is foredoomed to failure. In the aftermath of an uneventful African fete, Blanche gives her father a good-night kiss that goes astray and shatters their life. Michel gets obsessed with his 11-year-old daughter and what malignantly sprung from a neglected love, swells monstrous all the time but the narrator calls it nothing but-love."