Synopsis

The wood is old, the barrel is empty, and yet it still contains a little wine. How little would it take to throw it all away, to clear it all out? It wouldn't take anything. No one would object. It would make room for those who need it—and everyone around is desperately in need of space. But Sapo Matteucci decides to care for the remaining wine, and he devotes himself to it with a strength and courage and patience and perseverance and sincerity he has never reserved for anything else in his entire life. He ages it. He bottles it. He brings it to the table and serves it to us—and that wine is this novel, and it is prodigious. Sapo Matteucci isn't just its author: he's also its protagonist, and he tells us without pretense about a man's decline—his decline—as only great writers occasionally manage to do, at the end of their careers. Except that this novel is the beginning of Sapo Matteucci's career, because it is his debut. In the most banal and cruel war zone of our earthly adventure, the family, where everything is destined to become conflict, rediscovers the original joy we all lose sight of, that of being in the world, and celebrates the exhilarating and poignant bond with everything in the world that holds it back. Mothers, fathers, dogs, children, rabbits, and pains in the ass dance in these pages with overflowing, dissipating vitality, described by an eye that loves without alternatives and by a language that gracefully treads the paths of great literature. That great literature that Sapo Matteucci nourished for fifty years without ever attempting to produce, and which finally slipped out of him in this book, as when fate is at stake.