The novel tells the story of a widowed professor, and deals with themes such as loneliness, defeat, detachment, and ennui.
[2] The principle characters of the novel are:[3] The novel's protagonist is Aram Shah, a widowed university professor who raised his daughter, Marisa, on his own after his wife died during her second pregnancy.
At the outset of the novel, he wakes up during a visit to the mountains and ponders the meaning of three dreams he had had overnight—of lions frail with age; of a palace reeking with disinfectant; and of a museum among whose holdings is a jar with an embryo.
The intensity of his feelings induces a stroke, and he reawakens, paralysed, in a small regional hospital, where he is tenderly cared for by a resident matron, Asika.
She is middle-aged like Aram, and the two are drawn together, as though they were a couple of half-dead people finding in each other's company a glimmer of life's renewal.