First it’s so muggy it takes you by the throat. Then an infinite number of rainy and freezing days. A big city in the North, in the trafficky area of the train station and an important shopping street. In the years of his maturity, Pietro, kicked out by his wife Caterina, takes refuge in a two star hotel, the Mondial, right in front of his old home. From the window in room five, he spies on his family and in particular, on his daughter Lisa. To see her close-up he even buys a pair of binoculars. Pietro lives in a region that’s out of time and space; it’s as if he stopped on the doorstep of his life, waiting for something that will turn him on, that will turn him on anew. He was successful with his first book, but then the ones following were panned; he’s lost his job in an insurance company and if it weren’t for Lisa nothing would bind him to the world any longer. But in this desert where only one flower grows, little by little the people crop up who will accompany Pietro in his new life: Alberto, the salesman who has invented an existence while trying to make himself a real one, Gloria, an occasional lover in her fifties, and then Nina, with a slow beauty that will drag him into the white eye of her cyclone in a whirlpool of requests that cannot wait any longer. Marco Cassardo, with his second and mature literary effort gives us a novel that questions the why and the intensity of feelings. The story is surprisingly inside life (and what else is there, if not life?) and far from the current clamours of literary discourses.