Quiet Chaos

After an afternoon of surfing with his brother, Carlo, TV executive Pietro Paladini spots a group of people at the water's edge - out in the waves, two women are drowning. Pietro and Carlo race to save them, fighting against the frantic women and the strong currents. Once ashore, the brothers slip away from the melee of the scene, and Pietro heads home, only to find his young daughter, Claudia, wide-eyed at the side of the road. His wife has unexpectedly died while he was saving the life of another.
After numbly feeling his way through the rituals of death, he finds reassurance in the beginning of the school year, bringing Claudia to her classroom, in watching the other children and parents. On that first day, he decides to wait for his daughter and work from his car in the parking lot -after all, who knows when she will need him, when the grief will hit her full force? Or when it will hit him? Or how?
On the second day, Pietro again waits for his daughter...and the third, and the fourth. Outside his daughter's school, Pietro finds something like peace and a sense of security in the daily life of the park, the café across the street, the parking lot, and the people who are there everyday. As the world passes him by, strangely, his colleagues, friends and family turn to him with their problems - his company is about to undergo a devastating merger, his crazy sister-in-law is pregnant again - and he becomes newly involved with their lives. It's there in the park that the woman he saved finds him, stirring in him a distracting, overbearing lust that stands in the way of what he wants to feel about his wife's death. Through their angry, unforgiving union, Peitro's days outside the school reach their culmination, and his grief is finally transformed into acceptance.
At turns funny and dark, unexpectedly compelling and powerfully real, Pietro's emotional journey leads the reader into the odd, beautiful moments of the everyday, each a window into Veronesi's engaging contemplation of grief and its resolution.