The seven beautiful short stories in this collection concern the lives of an upper-middle-class family in small town Argentina in the 1930s. It is a patriarchal society, bound to fading customs and harsh realities. The Model T has arrived and so too has the Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, but little of the outside world is known first-hand, instead only as depicted in the French novels they read. The collection is followed by the author's notes on his thoughts about the writing of each story.
