The novel is set in a small Istrian village, spanning a period from the early twentieth century to the 1970s.
The narrative charts the momentous events of the century just past: the final years of the Austrian Empire, the First World War, annexation to Italy, the partisan war, and ultimately integration into Yugoslavia following the 1947 peace treaty.
These historical events had a profound impact on a border community composed of Croats and Italians: the former in the majority and generally poor peasants, the latter a minority of wealthy landowners.
Yet it is not the social theme that interests the author, even though it naturally surfaces throughout the narrative, especially in the frequent blending of Croatian and Italian—one of the book's most compelling features.
The theme of the story is entirely internal and can be distilled into a single subject: religion and its function for the individual and for a small community.
Tomizza envisions an elderly sacristan recounting his life, and that of his fellow villagers, through the succession of parish priests over the years.

How many priests had I not had to deal with: priests with mothers, with sisters, with housekeepers, and priests on their own.
During sleepless hours they revolved before my eyes like a carousel reflecting myself and at the same time the political circumstances of their era.
I pondered in the dark that each could have appeared better to me, and each worse, depending on the times, but also by virtue of my own changing way of being and assessing them.
(...) Why did I stay? It is hard to answer today, for it is hard to be believed.
I felt I was serving the church, and through it the community, not the priests, who were all destined to pass away.
I had wedded myself to that service, to that duty, even before Palmira, and everything else came second, Palmira included.
Yet I was resolved to forge another path for our son, and this commitment partly redeemed me, even in her eyes

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This quotation encapsulates the long journey of the protagonist-narrator, which leads him to drift away from religion as he witnesses the decline of the parish he serves throughout his life.

The church is a building like any other; it will end, as is predictable, without making much of an impression: atop the hills one can still see the walls of small churches from centuries past, engulfed by briars.
Yet back then there was a recovery, and people returned to the fields as well.
Will it happen again? I doubt it.

Born to a sacristan, he becomes one while still young.
The priests who follow one another are profoundly different: some ignorant and coarse, others overbearing and arrogant, still others frail individuals, quick to sin with wine and women.
Only one, a young Croatian priest, seemed to embody what is expected of a man of the cloth.
Yet later, when he sees him again as a bishop, he realizes that he too has become false and hypocritical.

From him I would have expected to hear, or at least read upon his face, the disillusionment, the wounds that could not fail to have been inflicted.
(...) In earlier times, would he not have been prouder, if not more compassionate?

.
And so, left without a parish priest to serve, the old sacristan has no choice but to become the chronicler of his people.
In the book's final, deeply evocative pages, the protagonist recounts the lives of some of his fellow villagers, such as gnagna Zvana Zuncolin, a "stooped, dark little woman," or Michelin, once "a handsome, dark man with gypsy eyes," who spent a lifetime as a drunkard to forget the woman he loved: he remains famous for the phrase, "there are no spare parts for man."

The narrative style is not always effortless, yet the reading moves briskly because one remains captivated by the story of a community—first isolated and hidden, then increasingly caught up in momentous events.
In Tomizza's narrative, never folkloric or nostalgic, religion intertwines with ancestral pagan customs and new, ostensibly secular and anticlerical mores.
And the church is always there, "somehow simply present," with its registers of births and deaths, written partly in Croatian and partly in Italian, in hands both clear and obscure: a presence from which the protagonist wishes to escape, yet cannot, because

it adhered perfectly to that which I had always learned to know and, for convenience, am accustomed to calling ordinary (life), yet it did not completely coincide with it, while still enchanting me, while still helping me discover hidden or unnoticed facets of real life

.
Yet by thus contenting itself with "its own full power," religion does not resolve the mystery of death, leaving the individual alone and questioning at life's most solemn moment.

Does the void of the heavens descend upon the earth, or does the better life open wide above us? This I did not know, that the world dies with every death of a man

Why read it? Allow yourself to be enchanted by the story of an ordinary life in a small Istrian village, between Croatia and Italy.

The Better Life