Ionesco, more famous as the leading exponent of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ published this novel in 1973. Its anonymous narrator is a clerk who for twenty years has led a drab existence working in a small-time business, living in a dingy hotel, neither content nor rebellious — one of those ‘whom society has dragged along with it no matter which way it went.’ But when he inherits a small fortune from a distant American uncle he finds himself at liberty to study ‘the mystery of the universe’ which has troubled him since his adolescence.


He becomes a gourmet and a latter-day flâneur (one who engages in pleasureable urban wanderings) but, unable to make any sense of life, succumbs to a moral and aesthetic ‘neutrality’ rather like the one described in Sartre’s Nausea. Language is reduced to noise, people and places to ‘illusions of the void’; newspaper accounts of wars, famines and disasters serve only to punctuate his boredom as he drinks, ponders the patterns of the wallpaper in his new apartment, then drinks some more.


Lost among ‘ephemeral intersections of energies, forces, various and contradictory tendencies,’ slipping into madness, all he longs for is some ‘immutable, basic foundation,’ a ‘morning of grace’ on which ‘everything will be made clear.’ Civil unrest leads to civil war outside his very window, buildings, whole streets are destroyed and rebuilt and neighbours have children, grow old and die while he, like a space-traveler, stands still as years pass by him in a day (here Ionesco’s absurdist hand comes into play).


In the novel’s apocalyptic final passages, though, he is perhaps granted his long-awaited morning — or has he simply fallen beyond rescue into the abyss of his confused mental meanderings, and died?.

‘What was beyond the walls? Well, when you really thought about it, there was a positive side to the picture: the daily prison, the little jail inside the big one, had opened its doors to me. Now I was able to stroll at will along the main thoroughfares, the broad avenues of the big jail. It was a world comparable to a zoo in which the animals enjoyed a kind of semi-freedom, with man-made mountains, artificial woods, and imitation lakes, but at the far reaches there were still the same old fences.’ p20