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 orless 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.