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Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to sexual assault, rape, murder, child abuse, death by suicide, and mental health conditions.

Part 1 centers on a group of four literary academics from Europe: French Jean-Claude Pelletier, Italian Piero Morini, Spanish Manuel Espinoza, and British Liz Norton. They share an obsession with the mysterious, reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi.

Pelletier discovered a love for Archimboldi in the early 1980s. After reading D’Arsonval, he set out to find Archimboldi’s works but struggled to find other novels. Eventually, he began translating his work, becoming one of the foremost French scholars on Archimboldi. He is a professor of German in Paris. Through this position, he meets the Italian Piero Morini. Archimboldi was more widely read in Italy, so Morini did not struggle to find his other novels. As a person with multiple sclerosis, Morini uses a wheelchair. He teaches German literature at the University of Turin and, like his fellow critics, is recognized for his translations of Archimboldi’s works.

Manuel Espinoza dreamed of becoming a writer. After negative experiences with other writers, however, he accepted that he would never succeed as a writer. Amid this bitterness and resentment, he forged a career as an academic of German literature.