His name is Matthias Pascal and he is a somewhat peculiar librarian in the colorful Sicily of the early twentieth century. Matías has long since lost all his fortune, married the wrong person and lived a tenacious and opaque life like a sleepwalker. One day, absent from his house, Matías reads in
A La Florida newspaper reviews his own death and his first reaction is to exclaim: "What?", while experiencing physical symptoms very similar to fear. His second thought is a mixture of confusion, anger, daze, brief moments of anguish, some faint tantrum, and then nothing. Only the exciting certainty of knowing that the world – with wife, mother-in-law and creditors – believes him dead, and that this can be a great advantage. A promise of escape, of atonement.
The whole novel – to which his picaresque and existential odyssey leads – is a profound reflection on the constant struggle to establish a human self. Because in the end the self is not something that you just have. Because our endless and impossible journey home is indeed our home. Of course, underneath everything, even the centrifugal way in which the book is narrated, there is the terror of death. What disorients Matthias Pascal is also what drives him to return home and make amends for the mistake of his death: the panicked fear of oblivion, the old horror of the grim reaper, the fear of the grim reaper, the fear of the grim reaper, the fear of the grim reaper, the fear of the grim reaper, the fear of the grim reaper, the fear of the grim reaper, the
always, the everyday one, absolutely problematic.