La bella indifferenza

One day Ettore Corbo finds out he can no longer see people’s faces. They have been replaced by a void, an oval void stretched over their faces like a mannequin head. Medical tests do not give answers to the problem, and for Ettore, a tired accountant working in the family business and trapped in a joyless marriage, there is no way to escape this partial blindness, a blindness concealing others from him; or perhaps showing them in their whole blank nakedness. Gradually his loneliness grows, and he becomes more and more ferocious, thorny, unaffected by daily life and rituals. Indifferent to the political climate getting tenser around him, Ettore closes himself off the rest of the world while another possible life seems to disclose, as absurd as the life of a flat-faced mannequin can be.

A tense, terrifying book, cruel and merciless, reflecting in the deformed story of an individual the indifferent drifting of an entire world.