In the Place Where We Thought We Stood tells the story of a French-American translator travelling by train from Paris to Barcelona, then on to Madrid to comfort his mother-in-law who recently suffered a stroke. Haunted by his wife's recent suicide and by his inability to complete his translation of the correspondence of the writer Ingeborg Bachmann and her lover Paul Celan, he struggles numbly to make sense of the moment, the day. Set entirely in the course of this journey, the novel-at heart a reckoning with things past-explores the fleeting little triumphs of love.