Part One: First Stop
In Caracas in early summer 1957, Walter Faber compiles a report on the events of the previous few months. On a flight from New York to Mexico, his plane had made a forced landing in the desert. During the following stay he met a German man, Herbert, who turns out to be the brother of Joachim, Faber's friend. Faber had not heard from his friend since 1936. Faber decides to accompany Herbert, who is on his way to visit his brother. After an odyssey through the wilderness, they reach Joachim's plantation. But Joachim has hanged himself. Herbert decides to stay behind and manage the plantation.
Throughout this part of the report, Faber intersperses his memories of the 1930s, when he worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) and met the art student Hanna. The two had become lovers, and one day Hanna revealed that she was pregnant. Faber made awkward attempts to marry her, but she was reluctant. Faber had received an offer from Escher Wyss to work in Baghdad and he accepted it; he and Hanna split up. Before his departure, Faber asked his friend Joachim to take care of Hanna, and he believes that Hanna has agreed to an abortion.
Faber returns from the plantation to New York City, while ultimately en route to Paris for a series of conferences, and encounters his married mistress, Ivy. Looking to escape this relationship, Faber chooses to leave earlier for Paris by taking a boat. On this journey, he meets a young woman Sabeth, with whom he falls in love. He proposes to Sabeth at the end of the journey, but she is traveling with a male friend. Faber and Sabeth meet again in Paris and Faber decides to go on vacation and accompany Sabeth on a road trip through Europe, where they also start a sexual relationship. Faber even calls the trip their "honeymoon".
Because of a foreboding, he asks Sabeth for the name of her mother and she replies "Hanna". Faber still hopes that Hanna had proceeded with an abortion, but it soon turns out that Sabeth is his daughter. In Greece, where Hanna now lives, a poisonous snake bites Sabeth. She falls backwards after seeing Walter come naked out of the ocean, and is soon rushed to the hospital by Faber. There he meets his former love Hanna again. Luckily Sabeth survives the snakebite. However she suddenly dies due to an untreated fracture in her skull caused by the fall. Faber feels a certain measure of guilt as he had not mentioned Sabeth falling.
Part Two: Second Stop
From July 19, stricken by grief and stomach cancer, Faber writes notes from a hospital in Athens. These notes cover the period immediately after Sabeth dies, when he flies the following day to New York and then onwards to Caracas where he revisits Herbert Henke and compiles the report of Part One. He then flies back to Europe, stopping in Havana on the way. In Düsseldorf at Hencke-Bosch, he watches the films he has taken in the previous months with a technician.
At the end of the narrative, Faber is in hospital facing an operation for his stomach cancer; he has optimistically calculated the probability of his survival, and after a last entry in his notes before the operation, the book ends.[1]
