Synopsis

On the evening of June 16, 2004 (exactly one hundred years after the original Bloomsday), engineer Alberto Cappagalli, in his home in Commiserate Ontona, felt particularly inspired and decided that was the right night to begin writing the novel of his life. In the space of a night, he managed to write twenty pages, and he wouldn't continue beyond that. Those twenty pages, however, already contain everything, or at least that's what Daniele Scolari, his brother-in-law, demonstrates to us. From that short text, he develops the story of Alberto's entire life, an everyman from the grayest, most industrial Northeast. Because every word has a specific meaning in a man's life, its own legacy, and through an objectifying system of narrative accumulation structured in notes that compose a biographical glossary, we end up ranging from Alberto's childhood (the verb "infilare," for example, transports him to an ancient living room, where a still-living grandmother asks him, as a child, to "thread" the cotton thread through the eye of a needle) to his more immediate and recent daily life, lived between an overly cultured wife and a cheap pizzeria, parquet flooring in need of replacement, and long-suppressed impulses. "A minute Odyssey," in short, that tells us about the vices, weaknesses, and tiny basenesses we all commit every day.