The novel begins with the publication of A Traveler on a cold winter night: the reader bought the book with joy and couldn't wait to open it. But after reading page 32, I found that the book was wrongly bound and I couldn't read it anymore. So I went to the bookstore and asked for a replacement. The bookstore owner explained that he was informed by the publishing house that Calvino's A Winter Night Traveler was confused with the Polish writer Badzak Barr's On the outskirts of Marburg when it was bound, and promised to replace it. At the same time, the male reader also met the female reader lyudmila in the bookstore. It was also on a cold winter night that she came to ask for the replacement of the wrongly bound traveler. Male and female readers continue to read the novel "On the outskirts of Marburg", but due to typographical errors, they can't read it without reading the first chapter. They found that what they were reading was not Calvino's new novel, nor a Polish novel, but a Smolian novel. So they decided to go to the university for personal advice. University teachers can't solve the problem, so they go to the publishing house to find the answer. In the conversation with the editor of the publishing house, male readers found that all these setbacks were caused by a translator named Marana: Marana once fell in love with lyudmila; Because lyudmila loves reading novels, he thinks the author of novels is his rival in love, which makes his relationship with lyudmila in crisis. How can we defeat this rival in love? Because he thinks that literary works are fake, forged, imitated and pieced together, he began to imitate, piece together and forge novels from all over the world, hoping to blur the image of the novelist by these means. In this way, when lyudmila is studying, he won't feel that lyudmila has forgotten him. So where does this insidious translator Marana live now? The male reader learned from various aspects that he might be hiding somewhere in South America, so he decided to look for him there. After all kinds of twists and turns, male readers still can't find the novel they are looking for, so they have to return to their hometown. Finally, the male reader came to the library in his hometown. Through chatting with other readers, he understood that there were only two endings in ancient novels: the hero and heroine suffered a lot, either they got married or they both died. So the male reader decided to marry the female reader. Their story also ends with their union.