Synopsis

A young man is forced to return to his hometown to sell the family home: it's a painful return, as is the discovery of five notebooks written many years earlier by his older brother Marcello. Reading them for the first time, the boy, now a man, thinks back to the summer of 2002 when the two brothers still lived together, with their mother and her partner, nicknamed Wayne. Their home was squeezed between their maternal grandmother's and that of a man nicknamed the Thrush. In the notebooks, Marcello recounts many things about that summer: the outdoor dinners, the furious arguments between the Thrush and Wayne, the love affair between their grandmother and the Thrush, the conflicted relationship between their mother and grandmother. Among the various episodes recorded in the diary, one in particular will be the one that will trigger the series of events that will lead to the unexpected and dramatic epilogue. With a perfectly balanced style and a language that blends elegant lines with more colloquial terms, Claudio Lagomarsini manages to reveal the twilight of a patriarchal, sexist, and backward world, capturing from the inside a society destined to disappear, yet still so representative of our country. Between backyard dinners, arguments over a vegetable garden, and retrograde behavior, We'll Shoot the Survivors Again recounts the daily life of a small and petty provincial community and the anguish of those who can no longer cope with this daily routine. The attachment to the boundaries of private property and the oppressive atmosphere of the residential area at the center of the story are at the heart of this remarkable debut novel, which explores the plight of a young man who, despite his acute sensitivity, is powerless against the narrow-mindedness and distance of the family he has been given.