A haunting work, reminiscent of Albert Camus, which portrays, with exquisite psychological detail, the emotional crisis in the life of Jean Calmet, a young Swiss schoolteacher. As novel opens with the father's cremation, conveying the sense that, even though his father's body has been reduced to ashes, his spirit survives to haunt Jean. His father's prodigious vitality and virility had crushed his family and ruined his son's childhood. Even after his father's death, Jean cannot be free. The parental ogre's actions continue to suck Jean into a vortex of despair.