Synopsis

Giuseppe, the protagonist of this novel, leaves Bologna one November morning for Giardini Naxos. He visits his father Sergio, hospitalized following a stroke, despite not having seen each other for years. From his hospital bed, Sergio recounts his story, while Giuseppe listens and remembers: episode after episode, they reconstruct the origins of their estrangement and the loneliness, born of abandonment, that unites them as survivors. Through a prose that strives for poetic precision, Nibali depicts two generations, comparing the passions of one and the apathy of the other, two sides of the same animal eternally doomed to defeat.