A young man returns to the island of his birth in order to sell watches. He starts the expedition with 90 watches of varying designs and prices. He carefully calculates how much time he needs to sell all the watches in the several hours between the ferry's mid-morning arrival and late afternoon departure. Should he miss the ferry he will have to wait another three days before the next crossing. The jacket blurb tells us of a girl who is killed during his visit to the island. The narrator, not an omniscient spokeman for the author, but an alter-ego for the protagonist, Mathias, focuses on a girl on the ferry, who disappears from the story as the passengers disembark. Mathias finds a length of cord that he puts in a pocket. He remembers that he collected such cords and strings as a boy. The author takes the reader into flashbacks without warning. Mathias begins his rounds on the island. He had already sold a watch to a sailor who suggests visiting his sister's family. There are three daughters. From flashbacks of his youth the author takes the reader to imagined watch sales with the mother of the three daughters. Things become even more disjointed by a simple trick. The author reverses the order of several paragraphs as Mathias has trouble with his rented bicycle and meets an old woman on his way. Mathias sells a few watches here and there, but realizes that he has not accounted for the time lost in making a pitch and not selling a watch. He continues to revise his calculations, trying to keep them as precise as the watches he is selling.
Eventually he hears that the youngest of the three girls is missing, her flock left on its own. In spite of his carefully planned itinerary he cannot explain how the middle sister passed him, looking for her sister, and discovered the abandoned flock. The day winds down with more strange occurences and bicycle trouble, causing him to miss the ferry by a couple of minutes. Obsessed by the death of the girl, the length of cord that is/was in his pocket and the missing time when he first had bicycle trouble, he goes over his tracks the next day, trying to prove either his innocence or his guilt. He looks for what he considers incriminating evidence, learning that many people are suspected of a crime that has not been established. The Voyeur is a fascinating psychological drama that takes place in and around Mathias's mind. What makes it even more extraordinary is the simple prose structure juxtaposed with psychic time travel. Tension is built by the reader's understanding that things are not as they seem. This lack of clarity remains until the last word on the last page. An excellent read.