Summary

The novel opens in the month of May with the 19-year-old narrator, speaking in the first-person, describing an expedition up the coast to gather salt for the "sacred meal" (1). One morning during the expedition, the narrator observes warships entering the mouth of the river. The narrator sees a man standing prominently on one of the ships and claims that she already knows who he is. When the narrator returns home, she reports to her father, the king, about the ships she saw. Her father expresses that he had been expecting as much, but not this soon.

The narrator then, speaking from a moment whose temporality is unknown, testifies that she has knowledge of her own life, and that her name is Lavinia. Lavinia is in doubt about the nature of her existence, for she claims to have been partially invented by a poet...