Teeth are, for those of us who keep them till we die, our final message across the centuries to posterity: our smile, our grimace of rage or envy to the person rummaging in the dust, perhaps thousands of years hence, who finds the remains of our fleeting presence on the earth.
This is the tragi-comic account of one man's life through the fate of his teeth; from the loss of his first milk tooth swallowed by his father in a prison camp, to the eventual fixture of a set of dentures. Each chapter devoted to a particular tooth, the unnamed narrator charts fifty years of East European history. Swept up in its agitated course, he becomes involved in secret plots and covert missions, while on a personal level he engages in endless affairs and a ceaseless reflection on the meaning of life.
Metaphysical, hypnotic and unsettling, this is at once a spy story, an adventure and a philosophical novel bristling with black humour.
