The end may turn up to be a new beginning. A mother's death, at the start of the novel, separates the time into a before and an after. The long, claustrophobic journey away from the family is completed and now the protagonist can start a new life, out of the Marsh, reaching the Mouth, riding on the Wave. Destination? Unknown. It is not important, what counts is the journey.

We know everything about her, except her name, irrelevant after all, because she is not the only one carrying her share of pains around the world. She narrates about herself, focussed and careful not to make mistakes, studying and "dissecting" other people's souls and bodies, so much so that she misses the obsessive attention towards herself.

Experiencing herself as the paradigm of human error, she is oppressed by a feeling of inadequacy, of being unable to accept the original deprivation, her starving for love, and so she looks in people's lives for the strength she cannot find in herself. Here come the short-circuit: in the difference between her inner life - frozen, but still vital and unsaid - and the great ocean of life, where people seem to swim at ease.

The mother (ferocious, ancestral life-giver), the father (grey witness), Marina (life-infusing sun power), Gioia (the sister-conscience), Virginia (daring hypothesis): players come and go from the scene in a narrative flow permeated by suffering, but also wild self-mockery, leading us with firm hands through a long process of rebirth. A rebirth spurring her to run after her own identity: after a "straight" past she unveils her true dimension, which she embraces fully.

Her life meets at a crossroads with a universe peopled only by women she knows she belongs to. But all of a sudden all crumbles down, her new life she had so persistently pursued, becomes meaningless and a new defeat takes the form of the end of love. Without Marina, her nourishing spirit, who had helped her opening up to life, she has to go out at sea alone. Counting the chances she has to survive out there, would mean pushing the stop button. Stopping for ever the film that keeps running in her head, scene after scene.