The narrator, who remains unidentified throughout the book, recounts a series of encounters he had with a man named Jacques Austerlitz during the narrator’s frequent trips from England to Belgium in the 1960s; these meetings with Austerlitz occurred over three decades, spanning to 1996.

The narrator begins his story: Back in 1967, he falls ill upon arriving by train to Centraal Station in Antwerp. After resting in a park, he visits Antwerp’s new nocturama, which contains an exotic collection of nocturnal animals. There appears in the text the first of the black-and-white photographs that are interspersed throughout the novel: four cropped close-ups of eyes, belonging to two nocturnal animals and two people. As the animals in the nocturama peer at the narrator with the penetrating gaze of a philosopher, he wonders whether the zookeepers turn on the lights at night so the animals can sleep.

The narrator’s memories from the nocturama blend with those from the salle des pas perdus, the concourse of the Centraal Station, to which he returned after the nocturama. In the twilight, under the 60-meter-high dome of the concourse, the few travelers look like one of the species from the nocturama, “the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland” (24).