Albert Camus
Lo Straniero

This is a silent book. This is one of those books that, unfortunately, will leave a mark on you. It will leave a mark precisely because it is silent.

The only things you will be able to "hear" from this book are a few gunshots and some screams, at the end of the first and second part, respectively. There are only two parts; the book reads quickly, it is sleek and light: no romantic landscape descriptions, no detailed and symbolic portraits of characters, no action described in pages of movements and frantic escapes.

Simply, the story of a man that unfolds neither particularly impulsively nor particularly reflectively. Passively. Meursault, our protagonist, is one. Just one, who so randomly couldn't be found better, and he lives with the ambitions of every "one" to be respected: work, home, the goal of a wife and family, and then nothing. After a few pages, the death of the mother, in a nursing home where she had been placed by her son, doesn't make him feel anything at all, and with this "feeling nothing," the story will continue: what happens, happens. Even a murder. A murder, which in the executor's activity seems nonetheless passive, a sort of reaction to the external environment and not of real intent.

An oppressive heat, a heat you have never felt while reading a book, which makes the atmosphere even more alienating, heavy, incomprehensible: the only moment of lucid activity for the protagonist will be in the end, and it will not be comforting at all. The previous alienation turns into something indefinite, with a bittersweet flavor, in the perverse gaze of one who has understood the drama and laughs at it for the impossibility of opposing it.

This is a book you will keep on your bookshelf, prominently displayed. Not because you want to show your guests how intellectual you are, but to remind you that this is a book, everything contained in it is bookish. Including that silence you have lived so many times and that has made you more uncomfortable than you want to admit, and you couldn't understand it, but you keep it in memory, it burns and torments you, in a kind of masochistic acceptance of the fact that it exists, that it has been.  It's not the silence of when you pass gas in an elevator, I'm not referring to that. 

What I'm referring to is the silence of indifference, and you've felt it in the most different situations, I can't tell you which. It's not so bookish, but I can't make you understand it if you haven't first read the book (it doesn't seem like the case to make a review as long as, or longer than, the book to explain it).

In essence, I was not able to make a review truly a review. Do you want to know what the style is like? Aseptic, devoid of baroque elements and literary frills. Dry and fast, few dialogues and an essential narrative. I've already briefly talked about the plot. The focal point, however, is all there.

This is a silent book. 

 Tremendously silent.