A series of intellectual essays that take us on a journey from the critique of hermeneutic interpretation and the exploration of the most audacious interpretations of Dante, Leopardi, and Joyce to the author's personal confessions as a reader of the interpreters of his novels and those boundary situations where one must decide between two Jokondes which one is the authentic. The essays discuss the limits of interpretation, cases of wasteful interpretive energy, and the criteria for the economy of reading.

A polemical attack on many "deconstruction" practices, the book can be understood as a change of course compared to Opera aperta, which many years ago provocatively favored reception and interpretation. But Opera aperta insisted on the dialectical relationship between the interpreter's initiative and fidelity to the original. On the contrary, today the uncontrolled freedom of the interpreter is excessively favored. The issue, therefore, is to reestablish the balance between the reader's intention and the work's intention (while the author's intention remains inaccessible).