Jack Baker, young american writer, charming and elegant, arrives in Tahiti with a mission : complete his monumental biography on the life and work of the great artist Paul Gauguin. He locks himself up in his four star luxury hotel room with view on the lagoon, his firm intentions being only to visit the local church library and other archives to enrich his research and documentation on the grand painter. But even the firmest intentions cannot resist what fate reserves for him : in the form of a certain Mister Sacha Cohn. Who is Cohn ? No one seems to know, maybe not even Cohn himself. He landed on the island some years back...