Or, Nothing

A man enters a bar. Looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the counter, he suddenly recognizes the face of his father, who committed suicide at the age of forty-nine. 

Thus begins the internal monologue of the protagonist, a forty-seven-year-old architect, divorced from a wife he now views almost like a sister, the father of a teenage daughter with whom he struggles to mend a relationship, and a respected professional like thousands. A lonely man accustomed to solitude, profoundly disillusioned, torn between moments of crisis, spiritual paralysis, and fleeting glimpses of hope, between the rejection of his father's role model and the irremediable awareness of resembling his father, not only physically. 

In a desperate attempt to find meaning in his existence, the protagonist sets himself an "expiration date": two years, before following in his father's footsteps to the end and ending his own life. 

A window into the mind and the soul of a would-be suicide, Or, Nothing is not just a moving, sweet story, redolent of desperate irony: retracing the relationship between a father compromised by fascism and a son who became a man in the post-war period, Antonielli has painted the moral fresco of an Italy as divided and in crisis just like its protagonist, emerging from the horrors of war with blood-stained hands and conscience, apparently launched towards a future of wealth, security and economic stability, but still deeply immersed in the mentality of placid convenience, in the swamp of gray areas, in the cotton wool of bureaucracy.