'It is the brain, it is the brain endures, yet even the pain from that misquote floods the mind. Which also shrinks and dies. As Eve falls.
    The immediate environment always shrinks, from house to flat to room to bed to coffin to earthworm - turns then grows again to compost to earth to planet to universe.
    Even language dies, like their speakers, thousands per century...
It is the brain, it is the brain endures.'

from Chapter 1

She is eighty. Facing death, she considers her experiments with narrative, and with the narrative of her life. What is the purpose of the narrative she is creating here, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? At the centre of Life, End of, in a mock-technical lecture from the Character to the Author, she comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like life: the narrative creates itself.

Christine Brooke-Rose's last novel is a darkly comic exploration of the meanings and non-meanings to which, in the end, life and art lead us.