Frans Laarmans is an office worker, who meets his future “mentor” at his mother`s  funeral. Mr Schoonbeke convinces him that he could make a brilliant cheese wholesaler. Laarmans soon becomes the owner and director of Gafpa, with all the accessories like home office, prepaid phone, and typewriter. He happily spends his day obtaining these things, while huge stocks of cheese are stored in the warehouse, waiting to be sold, but in vain. He deals with everything but his main task (he hates cheese, by the way). He employs agents too late, and they disappear one by one, so he himself begins to work as one, “certainly” with small portions first, and in his clumsy manner. The outcome can be well expected – he fails, cuts off the heading from his office papers, and returns to his former job. The price of sold cheese is transferred to the Dutch wholesaler, and Laarmans burns all bridges that could lead back to him.

However, this fall does not appear as tragic, as the way Laarmans is stuck to the appearance, his worries over insignificant things, all make the story grotesque. The tragedy lies in the fact that even his fall is pathetically small – an ambitious man`s silly struggle for rank and reputation, and the failure that follows – as if nothing has happened.
The subtle humour of the story – told in first person singular – is provided by the multi-style language that manipulates time in an exciting way.

We come across the same Laarmans in the second – shorter – story of the book, and we will realize that the time passed has not helped him at all. This time he is not motivated by his obsession for appearance, rather his cowardly character makes him get off the tram, and guide three Afghan sailors in the rain. Although he feels he is on his way out of the milieu of the petit bourgeois, the three sailors feel all the more at home in the Christian town. They try to find a girl, the love of all of the sailors (Laarmans hopes he might also have a share in the fun), but in vain. The point here is the conversation itself, via which Elsschot proves that there is chance for real dialogue between two people coming from different cultures. While Ali tries to understand the point in Christiandom when looking at Christ on the crucifix, Laarmans gradually becomes fascinated by the Oriental magic.
While the “clash” of two cultures of this kind might have been a real option in Antwerp in 1946, when the book was published, now it has a strange off-flavour. It is not by accident that in the Preface Gábor Németh highlights the sentence uttered by Ali (“You must behave in a foreign country the way locals do”), which could have been said by Jörg Haider.

The impressively designed series entitled Accents, which introduces Dutch-language literature, now has its latest piece, the Epilogue of which was written by translator of Wildfire Judit Gera (while Cheese was translated by Szabolcs Wekerle), and here we may obtain useful information about Elsschot`s  oeuvre.