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Rating: “Hear this: I tell you a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed; in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the last trumpet”.
Due to the Hobart Phase, time flows in reverse. An immense sidereal process that occurs once every billion years. Life returns from the grave, regressing back to the mother's womb.
“Oh yes, he thought: even Beethoven will come back to life; one fine day he will anxiously call from the depths of the coffin. And to what purpose? So that some of the most beautiful musical pages ever written are erased. What a horrible fate!”.
The ideas and inventions are dissolved by the "Eraseurs" who operate the Library, with the futile hope of preserving a condition that is doomed to perpetually regress. The events tied to the characters intertwine just as only Dick is able to imagine. People, when meeting, greet each other with a “'See you again”.
The protagonist is the "old" and melancholic Sebastian, holder of the Vitarium Flask of Hermes, with his five employees.
The Vitarium is tasked with digging up and selling the resurrected dead back to life, complete with the Sacrament of Miraculous Rebirth, and subsequent bureaucratic paperwork. Sebastian leads a life teetering between the grip of two women, his wife Lotta, influenced by him, and Anne, devoid of remorse.
“The real problem, said the android, is to determine the exact moment when the soul enters the corpse lying underground. Does it happen when the body is exhumed? Or when it first hears its voice calling for help? Or when the first heartbeat is recorded? Or when brain tissue has regenerated?”.
Another prominent figure is the Anarch Peak, saved from the Vitarium's tomb. A black theologian, tried for heresy, and expelled from the Episcopal Church. Also notable are other characters, such as the diligent agent Tinbane.
The detailed descriptions concerning the moments of return to life impress, to the point of creating in the reader the sensation of being physically present in the scene. The figures conceived by the writer, often at odds with each other, possess an ambiguous aura, as if they were trying to guard a dark secret.
“When you first wake up in the coffin, you feel supernatural fatigue. The mind is blank; the body does nothing. Then come the thoughts: things you want to say, actions you want to perform. You want to scream and struggle to get out. But the body doesn’t respond; you can neither speak nor move”.
The story contains elements of science fiction, but in reality, it's a nightmare novel, with a gloomy, dark, and oppressive atmosphere, unfolding throughout the entire narrative, characterized by dramatic and inevitable, even unforeseen events.
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