Section 1: Part 1 (pp. 3-18) Summary

This poetically written novel takes the form of a series of journal entries, written by a lonely middle-aged man as he spends what he sees as his final days in a guesthouse near the scene of a tragedy in his childhood. Themes relating to the nature of identity and of death are explored as the narrator's past and present intertwine in an experience of life both haunting and inescapable.

The novel begins with a poetic description of how "the gods" left on the day of an unusually high tide, bringing water that rose to the peaks of parched sand-dunes on the beach, upset the sea-birds, and triggered in the narrator the realization that he would not swim, "not ever again." He also describes how a wrecked and long abandoned ship "must have thought it was granted a...