Two strangers in this world

A man travels in an old Studebaker through villages and towns in northern Argentina. As a representative of the wholesale company J. J. Niemeyer, he sells goods of questionable utility to the shops he visits. Time and again, he reflects on his life, his childhood, his failed marriage, and his unfulfilled desires to succeed as a poet. The nameless man without qualities has long buried all illusions, has no social interactions, and is merely at the mercy of the absurd thoughts of his employer, Jott Jott Niemeyer, alias Reverend Pablo, who is evolving into a preacher. Life could continue like this indefinitely. Then he discovers a love letter in the nightstand drawer of his hotel, addressed to a man who has taken his own life, and decides to resume the interrupted correspondence under a false identity. A complex game of closeness and distance, of mutual deception begins, as not only the traveling salesman adopts a different identity, but the woman he adores, Clara, has taken on the role of a friend, Alina, who initiated the correspondence as a game. The author, who speaks in an unmistakable manner with precise yet poetic language about the impenetrability of the world and the darkness of our aspirations and desires, has long been regarded as an important storyteller of Latin America, and now, for the first time, one of his novels is available in German.