The narrator of TIGHTROPE, an extraordinary, curiously intellectual small girl, undertakes the demanding and costly burden of comprehending the world. Her father – a peculiar leftist intellectual, and her mother, a neurotic actress, belonging to an old farming family – are more or less social outcasts, who fight for survival. The situation prevailing in Socialist Eastern Europe in the period after the Second World War – setting and inherent part of the fabric of this tale – produces incidents which are funny, cruel, and absurd, eliciting both laughter and compassion.