Synopsis

Engineer Ivo Brandani has always lived in peacetime. When the book begins, on May 29, 2015, Ivo is sixty-nine years old, disillusioned, angry, and morbidly attached to life. He works for a multinational on a secret and disconcerting project: the reconstruction of the Red Sea coral reef using synthetic materials; the real reef is dying from air pollution. In the dreamy limbo of a return trip from Egypt, the various phases of his lower-middle-class existence are reconstructed: the profound decadence of the 2000s, the abuses and hypocrisies of a country overwhelmed by servility and bureaucracy, the illusory dream of a pristine and incorruptible place, the Aegean. And then, further back in time, the student protests of the 1960s, the discovery of love and sex, all the way to the barbaric postwar world, where Brandani experienced the nightmares and challenges of early childhood. Surgical and torrential, rambling and compelling, "Life in Peacetime" recounts, from the perspective of a lucid antihero, the history of our country and the contradictions of our bourgeoisie: its weaknesses, its aspirations, its impulses and its filth, what we deluded ourselves into being and what, in the end, we have become, despite ourselves.