Born in a factory town in southern Belgium in 1954, he was brought by his parents to the United States as a small child. Not quite knowing where he belonged, Sante grew up split: half in the old world, half in the new one, and resentful of both. His native land became ever more an abstraction, until he revisited it at age thirty-five. Suddenly he felt "as if I were taking a walking tour of my subconscious.".

So Sante becomes a detective, digging for clues to his childhood, to the lives of his parents, to the murky traces of his ancestors. He examines the social history of his native town, Verviers, which turns out to have been the home of his forebears for a millennium - a harsh industrial city, the birthplace of anarchists, autodidacts, and violin prodigies. And he looks at Belgium itself, an "artificial" country, "cast under the sign of ambivalence."