In the grounds of a country estate the main character encounters a few other people. One of them is the architect who designed the partly-finished building there that will serve as refuge when the world is ending, where he and his companions can meet the end whilst playing a Schubert string quartet and so die in a state of exultation. Suddenly, signs of the apocalypse appear and the narrator is whisked away to that shelter.

The construction and the events happening there are engrossing--the magic show, the attacks from outside, the sacrifices that weaken the enemy, all within a House-of-Leaves sort of place. But most of the book is stories, stories of a startling range of times and places told by many narrators. Some are within each other, some within dreams, and some refer to elements in other stories. The book is a sort of doomsday Decameron, I suppose.

All the stories are absorbing, and making the book even more enjoyable is Rosendorfer's playfulness, a sly playfulness that creeps up on the reader rather than shouting Boom Boom! There are digs at a fellow writer, musical and literary references, and delightful pastiches: A story placed in England has all the silly names, presposterous situations, and rapid-fire plot complications of a certain strain of British comic (or, to me, 'comic') novel. A fairly disturbing horror story contains of course a castle, packs of wolves, an evil genius and a naive young victim. The same spirit of fun seems to underlie the self-referential passages and comments: A man is killed whilst reading a book and, asks a story-teller, 'Do you think it was mere chance that it [the book] was the Sargasso Manuscript?'

By disregarding what Rosendorfer's said about dreams, time, and the universe--and by ignoring a piece of paper with holes punched in it--someone who likes tidy endings could convince himself that in the end the novel has come full circle. In any case, it's wonderful stuff that I'll one day re-read, no doubt catching many allusions that I missed this time.