Summary

The novel begins with Sophie Blind awakening from sleep. As she comes to consciousness, she is unable to remember where she is, and under what circumstances. She mistakenly thinks that she is in a number of different rooms that she remembers from her life. She is also uncertain whom she is with. She then concludes with certainty that she is dead, remembering that she died after being struck by a car in Paris. In a letter, Sophie describes her travels in Europe, and her imminent departure from Paris to Amsterdam in order to give a talk there on Spinoza.

A third-person narrator then describes the itinerant lifestyle that Sophie leads with her husband, Ezra Blind, who is an academic working on a book that would take “at least the next twenty years” (14) to finish. Ezra’s work as a scholar causes...