Sfiga means bad luck, the way sfigato means inept, unlucky, loser, downright pitiful, a word that coincides with another word that pullulates in the novel as well, sfinocchiato, meaning dejected, exhausted, fucked-up. These are signature words in this novel, and there is no doubt that Leo is pursued by bad luck and a paralyzing sense of inadequacy. There is no escape. Something grabs ahold of him and won’t let go until it chokes him, because, to paraphrase Cavafy, having ruined his life in this little corner, he has destroyed it in the whole world.

On Christmas Day, feeling completely disconnected and stranded in Rome, Leo Gazzara boards a train headed for Milan. Like Ulysses, who finally wakes up in Ithaca but fails to recognize his homeland now that two decades have elapsed, Leo has some difficulty identifying the street where he grew up. So much had changed during his short absence. But then having found his bearings, he spots his father leaving their building and getting into his car. Upstairs, from a window, his mother is watching her husband, while he gestures for her to get back inside and shut it, for fear of catching a cold. Leo has half a mind to put his arm under his father’s and surprise him, but then he hesitates and decides against it. He had planned to spend Christmas with them, but now he realizes that his sisters and their husbands and children, along with his parents, lead lives where someone like him has no place. Why bother them? He buys a sandwich and gets on a train headed back to Rome. But, then, Rome is not home, and neither is Milan, nor, for that matter, is Trieste. They are all mirages, leftovers from the ledger of time and space.

When he returns, he’ll eventually hear that the friends who had lent him their apartment are returning from Mexico, and thus, one by one, the cards dealt him are being reshuffled, the good with the bad. He is alone. He moves back to the hotel where he’d been living before his friends’ hiatus abroad.

There is only Arianna left, probably the love of his life. And she loves him too. But she lives with someone else now. Then he tells her that Graziano has died. And for the first time since he’s known her, she is totally hysterical. She was already weeping because she feared they couldn’t have a life together. Now she is inconsolable because death has brutally barged into their lives.