We are faced with a complex novel due to the possibility of different interpretative facets.

The historical side must be identified in the period from 1968 to 2008 with the relative economic changes that involve the transition from a national market to a globalized market; the social one with the change in the relationships between generations; the gnoseological one marked by the irruption of relativism, which puts millennial certainties back into crisis; the literary one that draws the tools from the tradition for a postmodern representation.

The profound change is caught particularly in the presented problems ranging from education to affectivity, interpersonal and family relationships, work, religiosity, life and death, through psychological introspection in which the light of certainties is attenuates in an indistinct gray, according to which good and evil overlap in an inseparable way.

It is not a matter of advancing new interpretations of the world, but of the tragic loss of every certainty, which corrodes the soul of the protagonists, marked by marvelous, exalting, and at the same time petty and depressing personal events, capable of exposing the intimate contradiction of the human being and of the current historical period.

The story takes place in the Piedmont area between Borgomanero and Stresa.