Grossman lost a son, killed during military service.
It is a wound so immense that he feels

mutilated in memory....
a prisoner of a remote cell in the penitentiary of my spirit

, as though "my life resembled something that never happened."
And so he feels the need to create a tale.

That motherfucking thing that happened to me and my son, yes, I must blend it into a story, I must.
With a plot, and imagination! And visions and freedom and dreams! Let it burn! A boiling pot!....
if I do not write I will not even be able to understand who he is now, my son, I mean

Grossman imagines a village where everyone has lost a child, but they cannot fully express their despair by decree of the duke—that is, of power:

indifferent, slow, sluggish, without a doubt: an exemplary duke

.
The scribe is tasked with spying on the inhabitants to monitor any violations of the ban.
In a way, he performs the function of the external narrator.
He transcribes the voices of the grieving parents who, as in a Greek tragedy’s chorus, cry out in a funereal chant—at once sweet and wrathful—their own stories and their yearning to have their child back.
Their chant gives voice to all the nostalgia and anguish of a bond between parent and child abruptly severed: the tender memory of birth and of his boyhood, the remorse of not having been a good father, of not having been close to him, the desire to smell his scent, if only for one last time, to touch his skin, to embrace him.

And suddenly, inside us, rises the vapor of his whole body, intact, and for an instant we can imagine: he is here

.
The immobility of grief could last forever, but it is broken by a man who decides to set out toward "down there," where he believes his son to be.
The man’s desperate act sets the other inhabitants in motion as well.
As in a sacred procession, they walk toward that mysterious place that is the afterlife.
Their march halts before a wall, in front of which they drop to their knees

and each of them, and each of us, whispers their child's name

And then Grossman understands that his son is dead:

I recognize the truth of these words.
He is dead, he is dead, but his death has not died

.
Memory detaches itself from pain and, as far as possible, we remember without suffering.
Yet then the story, like the ritualization of mourning, allows the son to be distanced:

it is only that my heart breaks, my darling, at the thought that I could find words for all of this

The book is a hybrid of prose and verse poem.
Written in prose are the notes of the scribe and the reflections of the Centaur—half writer and half desk—who unquestionably represents the author.
The verse structure is used for the chorus, which serves two functions: recounting the dialogues between the various characters, who, rather than speaking to one another, communicate with their lost child; and giving collective voice to the "wanderers," the group heading into the afterlife in search of their deceased children.
The narrative form is typical of Greek tragedy, with the significant difference that there is no plot development, no final moment of genuine catharsis.
There is no dramatic tension in the overarching plot; in fact, there is no real story.
On the other hand, the narrative is introspective, entirely contained within the author's consciousness.
The setting is Kafkaesque, surreal, not tragic.
It is an interior journey in which the characters are nothing more than instantiations of Grossman’s despair, of his anguish, and of his desperate attempt to accept the death of his son.

The lack of a narrative plot allows the detail to prevail over the overarching world of the tale.
The narration fractures into poetic fragments, evocative in themselves, yet isolated and sprawling within a narrative context devoid of development.
The reader must therefore surrender to the spell of individual words and phrases.
Consider the following passage:

as in the moment when a newborn bursts from the womb and from the mother's body, my son's death transformed me into the father I never was, pierced me with a tear and a wound and a sense of emptiness, while filling me with his presence, which has overwhelmed me ever since with an intensity never before seen. His death made me capable of conceiving him.
His death made me an empty shell of a father and also of a mother. His death leads me to bare a breast to one who will never suckle, and upon the walls of my womb, formed that day, carves with the nails of an escaping prisoner the tally of days spent without him.
Thus, with a transparent chisel, his death carved into me an awareness: whoever loses a child is inevitably a woman

Why not read it? Too many evocations within a story devoid of narrative rhythm.
In the end, it is boring.

Falling Out of Time: A Story in Multiple Voices