Part One

Nathan Hollander, the first-person narrator of In Babylon, begins his story with his memory of finding his uncle Herman dead in a hotel in Rotterdam, Holland, after the uncle had sex with a young prostitute. Nathan observes that Herman would most likely “have enjoyed dying that way.” This incident prompted Nathan to think about his past and his future, acknowledging that he feels “old and worn,” and to see himself as “an eyewitness, a stowaway in time.”

The scene shifts to the present, Herman's hunting lodge in Holland in 1995 outside Rotterdam, where sixty-year-old Nathan and Nina, his niece, are snowed in. Nina has been successfully working as Nathan's European agent for the fairy tales Nathan has written. She had given him a ride to the lodge, but the car got stuck in the snow, and she could not leave. To pass the time, Nina reads the...