A young man joins a team of experimented door-to-door salesmen, who teach him how to sell an expensive encyclopedia to modest homes that have no use for it.

Jan Bucquoy narrates the story of his sexual life to age 28, imagining his conception (parents drunk, the encounter lasting ten seconds) and reporting his first orgasm (at the hands of Eddy, in a beach-side caravan, as they watch Laurel and Hardy), his comparative experiences with girls, and his move from Harelbeck to Brussels. There he meets Greta, bartender at a Bohemian cafe, who teaches him the Kama Sutra, the naked Esther, who reads him stories, and Thérèse, his wife for three years. They split after two children; he moves to a small flat, writes pornography to pay the bills, works sporadically on a novel, espouses anarchism, and meets more women. His self-confidence grows.