Marcelo, a humble clerk in a Barcelona office who might have come from a novel by Kafka, inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing and a mental trauma has meant that he has been unable to put pen to paper; he has become a 'Bartleby', so named after the character in Herman Melville's short story who, when asked to do something, always replied negatively: 'I would prefer not to.'One day Marcelo, decides to make a search through literature for all possible Bartlebys who, for whatever reason, have had the urge to say 'no'., and to this end he has the engagingly original notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both real and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour that are at once hilarious, irreverent and stimulating.