The unnamed narrator of Francis Bacon s Armchair has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital and now has only one objective: to shut himself away in his apartment and contemplate the best way to restart his life. But his obsession with Cathie, a young woman he met during his convalescence, drives him out of his bedroom one night in search of a telephone which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his morbidly obese neighbor, Sauvage.

Sauvage is a translator overwhelmed by his current project, The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases, and by the...