"Incertezze" is almost like a third millennium reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, marked by the same vaguely masochistic obsessiveness of the narrator. Here too, the protagonist (Sandro) perceives himself as incompetent, a failure, weak; he is filled with regrets and remorse, is self-reflective, paranoid, and tends towards self-destruction. In his relationships with others, he oscillates between curiosity and indifference, sociability and brooding misanthropy, swagger and sullen shyness, between an almost “feminine” passivity and a masculine need for self-assertion in seduction (Sabrina, Lucia, Kari), and yet he presents as apathetic, listless, with muddled thoughts, albeit with sudden bursts of adolescent enthusiasm and vitalistic fury.

Sandro belongs to the gallery of inept characters populating 20th-century literature. His portrait is carefully etched and remains in the reader’s mind. What keeps him anchored to reality are two things: music (he plays in a somewhat disheveled band rehearsing a show that will never happen, except for one public performance with an experimental theater company, also disheveled) and then sex, which, although often mechanical and unemotional, at least brings him back to the biological truth of impulses, more enduring than any superstructure.

The atmosphere among friends and fellow travelers is well reconstructed, and there's an emphasis on the centrality of political commitment experienced with fanaticism, from which Sandro distances himself. The story unfolds in 1975, during the "Years of Lead." The observations on social class differences (Olympic Village-Parioli) are also interesting and sharp.

The language often relies on conventional, standardized expressions, almost more fitting of noir, hard-boiled, and genre literature. Yet, in its simplicity, it retains a sincerity that is consistent with the diaristic nature and self-confession of the novel.