In his only novel, the celebrated dramatist has chosen as his main character a man who is both utterly banal yet strangely touched with grace, a lowly clerk who is none-the-less prey to luminous visions. At 35 he quits the "rat-race" thanks to an unexpected inheritance and devotes himself to his secret passion: observing and meditating on the human condition. "It may well be" wrote the French critic François Nourissier in Le Point, "that in a few years we will come to realize that The Hermit is one of the essential works of our time, probing and detailing the illness of our century.