"Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night
years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed."
The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at
the complete meaning of the day's events, the narrator must first take
us on an international tour--from the docks of Buenos Aires, to
Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the
narrator's transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information
left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to
reconstruct Felix's stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures
up the hotel's labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager,
and the city's public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions.
Each character carries within them a secret that they don't quite
understand--a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a
wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the
sky. The Incompletes is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge,
haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just
outside our reach.