Synopsis

Instead of a watch like her brothers, her grandfather gives Maria a Polaroid for her First Communion: she's fascinated by the space around her and dreams of becoming an architect when she grows up, of moving to the city and wearing "purple shoes, maybe every day, to go out and enjoy the beauty, smelling good." And even though her father told her that "dreams never come true," Maria succeeds: she graduates, moves to Ferrara, works in Bologna in the studio of a prominent architect, attends bio-architecture conferences and exhibitions of the photographers she loves so much—in short, she has the life she's always wanted. And yet, every Friday she returns to the Po Delta, that swampy world she would have preferred to forget if Luca, the man she loves with a feverish intensity, hadn't been so attached to that land. He is cryptic, ambiguous, manipulative, alternating between contempt and sweetness. And when he leaves her, it's as if a flood wave were crashing beneath those "immense chicory-colored skies." In her debut novel, Germana Urbani mercilessly delves into the most intimate recesses of a woman's mind and the contradictions that shatter human relationships. She uncovers the knot that can bind the most naive love and the most blinding pain, blurring the opaque boundaries between passion and madness. A hazy snapshot of a Polesine area still scarred, both in its landscape and in family histories, by the memory of the great flood of 1951, "Who If Not Us" captivates, disorients, and forces us to confront our darkest impulses.