The novel stages an entire society inside and around a single nightclub, Tram 83, in a secessionist mining city, where diggers, prostitutes (including underage 'baby-chicks'), students, tourists, and hustlers converge in one relentless economy of sex, mineral trade, and survival. The recurring interruption 'Do you have the time?' functions as a solicitation, collapsing time, sex, and transaction into one gesture.
The prose is built from riffing lists, refrains, and incantatory repetition that mimic a jazz performance rather than linear plot, so the reader experiences rhythm and accumulation instead of resolution. Meaning emerges through cadence and the piling of names, professions, and bodies rather than through event.
In an economy organized wholly around mineral extraction, every body and relationship is reduced to a unit of trade: labor, sex, friendship, and even children become stones to be dug, sold, and consumed. The book presents this commodification not as a moral failing of individuals but as the atmosphere the mining regime itself produces.
Two former friends embody opposing responses to the chaos: Lucien clings to literature and the attempt to write a serious text, while Requiem thrives through blackmail, trafficking, and cynical hustle. Placing the idealist and the operator in the same room exposes how a collapsed economy rewards the opportunist and renders the artist absurd, without the book declaring either one right.