Friedjesh Karinthy is the most яркий humorist of his era, famed for his parodies of Hungarian and world classics; a journalist with astonishingly broad knowledge and a person around whom there was always a sense of celebration. Among his books, a special place is taken by an extremely personal novel, growing out of his own lived experience—illness, operations, and the path to recovery.
One day, in the cafe “Central” on University Square, while solving a crossword puzzle, the writer suddenly begins to hear the clattering of train wheels and realizes: it is not reality, but a hallucination. Soon the cause becomes clear—a brain tumor. Now the hero has a choice to make: to accept the inevitable death, or to risk a dangerous operation in faraway Sweden with a famous professor.