Dr. Apelles lives his life the way RECAP conducts its business. He has is daily routine of rising in the morning, walking to the train station, riding out to the countryside to the RECAP complex, and sorting books without taking breaks. Then he takes the train back to the city, dines in the same restaurant, has his one beer, goes home and reads a bit from one of his journals of translation scholarship before sleeping in his queen-sized bed. This routine he breaks every other Friday when he goes to the archive and works on his translations, carrying his pencils and having the same brief conversation with the reading room librarian every two weeks.

Dr. Apelles interacts with people the same way he sorts books at RECAP. As long-time resident of his apartment building, he knows a lot of basic information about his neighbors. He knows their names, their ages, the ages of their children, their occupations and their habits. This knowledge gives his neighbors a kind of comfort and lends Dr. Apelles a certain respectability, but it is all superficial. He doesn't really know them. He is not involved in their lives beyond brief exchanges in the hallway and the lobby, and they don't really know him. Apelles is himself like a book kept in RECAP.

Describing RECAP, the author states that, "In many ways, the library resembled a prison" [58]. Every book is assigned a place. It never moves from that place, and the books do not really interact or relate to one another. They are housed in boxes for the purpose of storage. Dr. Apelles knows enough about his neighbors, coworkers, and other people he encounters to put them in their proper places, and he keeps himself in his proper place. It is how he lives his life; it is his life sentence. But his view changes when he realizes that he has...

He knows that to be in love will require openness and a blending of lives and personalities that is not possible the prison to which he has relegated himself. He knows that he will have to break free of his own constraints to love and to be loved.
Treuer uses the idea of translation throughout the novel, both literally and metaphorically. Dr. Apelles is a translator. The work of translators is not creative: "it can't really be called productivity because they don't produce anything" [114]. When Apelles realizes that he has never been in love but wants to be, he understands immediately that he is going to have to change. He thinks that he will have to translate his life into a language that allows someone else, a significant other, to read it and comprehend it. He seems to see his life as already having been written but unreadable or untranslated. However, the truth seems to be that he has kept his life hidden, like a book stored in the RECAP facility, perfectly intelligible but inaccessible.

In order to truly love and to be loved, Dr. Apelles has to transform himself from a translator into a writer. He has to stop viewing his life as something he has to control or something that has been lived outside of him that he can interpret and present in a certain way. He has to accept who he is, his Indianness, not only to himself privately but also publicly. He has to be his story and be the creator of his story. Only then will his life be real and accessible enough to be shared, and only through sharing his life can he love and be loved.

David Treuer puts Dr. Apelles in limiting, contradictory and oppositional circumstances that compel him to grow beyond those limits and reconcile the contradictions so that he can be a whole, complete, unique person.