He wants to warn Marco, strictly against the ethics of his own profession, that his life is in danger.

Where to start? The first chapter-in fact, the third, because there’s an inconsequential seeming one-line postcard that divides it from the actual first-depends on the life-changing visit made by his wife’s psychoanalyst. A little over half-way between the first chapter and this one, the rather talkative narrator-I’m sure I’ll come back to the narrator later-makes one of his bold assertions: ‘It should be common knowledge – and yet it isn’t – that the course of every new relationship is set from the start, once and for all, every time and that in order to know in advance how things will end, you only have to look at how they began.’ I hadn’t realised, despite some dark hints, that this was a very big clue. The chapter I’ve decided to pause at-I’ve only read a few pages of it-contains a description of how it was doomed from the start. The first chapter is set in 1999, when the main character’s marriage is about to come crashing to an end.

It’s a part of the bag-of-tricks narrative that Veronesi’s approach is anti-chronological-without the dates in the chapter titles we’d be lost.

I don’t know yet whether this novel is more than the sum of its plotty, coincidence-driven parts, and I’m OK with that at the moment. Things happen to Marco Carrera, all the time.

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