Den Wald vor lauter Bäumen...

Oskar, who manages a highway construction site in southern Europe, struggles in a foreign world filled with unknown rules and mafia entanglements against looming setbacks. He finds it difficult to navigate this conflict, not least because the Art Nouveau hotel in an Alpine valley, a childhood prison for him and his brother, cannot be shaken off. The authoritarian grandfather intrudes into the minds of those he tyrannized during his lifetime, even after his death. Like in a hidden picture book, figures appear on the stage of the grand hotel and in the narrator's everyday life, disregarding any chronology, connected through his memories and thoughts. Which of the stories are real and which are figments of imagination? Did Rudolf Buchbinder prepare for a concert tour at the valley's end, and did Camilla Nylund cure her voice in seclusion? And what conclusions do the socio-meteorological studies of a Swiss linguist reach, if they were ever actually conducted?.