Jack Baker, a young and brilliant academic, arrives in Tahiti to write the fifty-seventh biography of Paul Gauguin. Nothing could be simpler normally. You just have to get started, work and not succumb to the charms of this earthly paradise. But in vain we have good resolutions - When fate is against you (and the sun is shining on the enchanting lagoons), the best wills are quick to stumble. For Jack, fate takes the maddening and malicious form of a mysterious character, well known, to their misfortune, to the inhabitants of the island: They call him Cohn. The individual in question landed in Papeete a few years earlier.