Gabriel Canales, raised in the countryside, has come to Santiago to attend university and seek his fortune. He soon falls into a pattern of partying. After he unintentionally kills a man following a session of drinking, he flees to his childhood home. The police rule the death an accident, and Gabriel returns to the city, where Fate hands him Teresa, a political activist who awakens him to the reality of what has been happening in Chile while he has been wasting his life away. Now, years later, he finds himself locked in the men's room of a Santiago movie house during the Chilean coup. With nothing better to do, he creates in his mind a movie of his life and looks in amazement at the string of seemingly trivial events that brought him to that men's room: "Roll at a given speed the film of your own life experiences and see them projected onto the screen of your astonished mind." Delano creates, in a series of flashbacks, both a picture of a single man and a picture of an entire nation over the twenty years that led up to September 11, 1973, a day as important in Chilean history as September 11, 2001, is in the history of the U.S. Translators John J. Hassett and Philip Metzidakis preserve the rich imagery and colorful language that make this book reminiscent of the best writings of Borges, Rulfo, Cortazar and Garcia.