Words spill onto the white pages of Passacaille like the blood of a stricken animal staining the snow. Phrases and sentences flow from the pen of a narrator holed up behind the rough walls of a country house as winter winds cuff the building at nightfall. From outside press in on Mortin the fragments of a puzzle he has never managed to fit into a pattern he can understand: the hostility of his neighbors; the reasons for their comings and goings; the course of the seasons; the signs of approaching death. Something or someone is apparently bleeding to death out there in the dark, spilling life blood onto the manure pile. Meanwhile, the narrator slumps at his desk and stares vacantly from time to time at a clock whose hands he has torn off in despair. Mortin cannot put the cluttered house of his consciousness in order, unable...