One of the most dazzling and ingeniously contrived works of twentieth-century fiction, an entire microcosm brought to life in a Paris apartment block. Serge Val-ne, one of the inhabitants of the apartment block, has conceived the idea of a painting which will show in exact detail the inside of each apartment within the building, every person, every object. As he thinks of his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known or heard about in sixty years living there. Chapter by chapter, room by room, the narrative moves around the building, revealing as it does so a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of ever more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime-