Book: The Mysterious Stranger by

The Mysterious Stranger

Author:

Genre: Novels / Fantastic Literature / Philosophy

Publishing Year: 1916

Language: English / Original Language: English

Original Title: The Mysterious Stranger

Description:

“The year was 1590. Winter. Austria was far away from the world and asleep; for Austria it was still the Middle Ages, and promised to remain so forever. Some people even went back centuries and centuries, claiming that on the clock of intelligence and spirit Austria was still in the Age of Faith.”

Eseldorf is an extremely religious town, its citizens are so religious that, in some cases, they tend to be irrational. They are from those communities that persecute witches, that live on superstitions, and that see anyone who goes against God as a harmful and dangerous enemy, or simply as being related to the devil...

To this remote, sleepy and peaceful village in Austria, an exotic subject called Satan arrives by surprise, a nephew of the "fallen angel", but who is still a messenger of God. He calls himself an angel and claims to be able to perform all kinds of magical and miraculous feats, as well as predict the future.

Theodor Fischer, a boy living in that Austrian village in the last years of the 16th century, is the one who meets the mysterious stranger and only he and his friends are aware of the true nature of that angel; the rest of the townspeople take him for Philip Traum, a simple stranger.

The strange character will soon turn the harmonious world of those villagers upside down, and not only because of his fantastic feats but also because of his intense effort to ridicule human nature, which from his point of view is much more bestial than that of the animal world.

With an incalculable imagination that transcends fantasy literature, the author mocks religious rituals and social insensitivity through sharp and instigating humor, much harsher than the one he used in his most famous works.

This work has as its central axis a transcendental social criticism by the author that expresses his ideas about the meaning of morality and the human condition. It is considered one of the most sarcastic and biting titles of its author.