"We count for nothing, because everyone unfortunately counts for everything." One morning in May 1945, three (or four) partisans show up with machine guns on their stomachs in a small villa in Milan's Fiera area hunting for a Social Republic officer (or perhaps three), they find him, an extensive exchange of views follows, and they leave. From this domestic anecdote, synchronized well or badly to the great events of History, seventy years of memories of a fifteen-year-old brother unfold, confused but punctilious, entrusted as they are to the "intermittent abuses of memory." the blood-blackness and chill of war, the sad charade of dreaming himself a hero, then the "crossing over to the enemy's side" (PCI enrollment), and then again a hesitant making part for himself; and the mutually protective relationship with his fascist father; and the "feudal" family of his strange mother; but also a necklace of misplaced loves, readings, theater, music, soccer, friends. Head and heart, however, keep returning to that May morning, that suspended hypothesis, that missed massacre. Thus, in an attempt to come to terms with his own ghosts, Vittorio Sermonti gives us a disconcerting book, traced in the form of a long love song for a you who has unmasked many of those ghosts of the "narrator narrated," and still gives him the will to live: a book that is also a meticulous chronicle of a country and an interminable postwar period, and, often mimicking the thoughts, vocabulary and voice of a boy of yesteryear, makes us reflect on the tragic and ridiculous search for ourselves that plagues us day by day, one by one: "we count for nothing, because everyone unfortunately counts for everything." Read the press review