Jack London
Il Vagabondo Delle Stelle

Who hasn't dreamed of floating among the stars, free, and getting to know worlds, cultures, and Time?
Darrel Standing did, and with his experience, anyone who reads this book will find themselves wandering through the stars and eras.
These statements may seem pure madness, a folly that perhaps doesn't suit the Jack London known for "White Fang" or "The Call of the Wild." Reading the social Jack London might be the best thing I've ever done.
I couldn't help but fall in love with this book, which becomes much more after finishing it.

The story, in its beauty, is quite simple:
Darrel Standing, sentenced to death in San Quentin prison, is constantly punished with the death penalty because he stubbornly refuses to reveal the hiding place of some explosives inside the prison, a place he actually doesn't know as he was framed by another inmate.
His death row companion, Ed Morrel, with whom he communicates through simple tapping with his knuckles on the walls together with Jack Openheimer, advises him to create the "little death," that is, to let his body die slowly until he can let his soul wander outside the prison.
Darrel's experience, however, differs from that of Ed Morrel, as he manages to make time leaps as if playing hopscotch. With his mind, he returns to being all the people he has already been.
Indeed, the little death isn't what might seem like an Opium crisis (as Jack Openheimer calls it), but he truly returns to being all those people he has been in his past lives.

Note that all this has little to do with Metempsychosis or reincarnation, but rather it is the message that London sends that is important, which is that we are nothing but a breath of wind that, just as it disappears, returns some time later. Thus, the human life of Darrel Standing and of all of us concludes and begins again cyclically.
The protagonist's strength is that through the "little death" he manages to retrace his lives and tell them upon returning from his journeys when the straitjacket is removed.
Thus, a poor man condemned to death finds himself as a Roman legionary, witnessing helplessly the death of Jesus, or as a sailor lost in Polynesia, who becomes a prince upon arriving in Korea and then a beggar.

However, I don't want to tell you all the characters Darrel Standing returns to; rather, I'll tell you that all this can also be seen as consolation for a dead man walking, now weakened by the straitjacket and hardship. The consolation not only of Darrel Standing but of all the condemned to death and lifers of 1913 America and today.

Ed Morrel, a true friend of London, really was in prison under a tough regime, and thanks to this book, he managed to reduce his sentence, just as Jack Openheimer truly existed. The novel thus manages to be anti-degradation of punishment and the suffering of prison. This book, in short, not only raises awareness of the prison conditions but remains modern and current, a hundred years after its writing, with a beautiful message.

“I have been a Son of the Plow, the Fish, and the Tree. All the faiths that have succeeded each other since the dawn of human religion are in me; and when the pastor, here in the Folsom chapel, on Sunday, worships God according to the modern rite, I know that the cults of the Plow, the Fish, and the Tree persist in him, as well as those of Astarte and of the Night.”

“They have put on me a shirt without a collar...”[...]

“In their eyes, I, who am about to die, must have something divine in me”