I’ve never been into crime fiction. This is not an excuse or an apology. This is a heads-up that I’m not going to tell you about how amazingly the crime(s) in this book are planned or described. Honestly, I don’t think I’m the right person to judge that. I haven’t killed anyone, have I? (Please understand that this is a rhetorical question so don’t go and look into my past, you might not find what you expect).
As I was saying, when I read a book I care too much about words and feelings and too little about the narrative. I am more into the theme than into the plot.
Nothing Important Happened Today was no exception. I liked that it was about suicide and the perfect serial killer. And I liked how more than half of the book was narrated as if there was no real action. Part of it was a manual for future serial killers, part of it was a quite detached description of the lives of the victims, and the rest was the actual plot, being there just because the other two parts needed an excuse to exist (or this might be just me looking for familiarity in an unfamiliar context – a crime fiction book).
The book it’s about a so-called cult put together by a mysterious passive killer that doesn’t actually kill anybody, they just convince their victims they have to commit suicide. And they kill themselves only because they don’t want to do it. That’s fucked up, isn’t it? I won’t go on spoiling it more for you, but I’ll just tell you that I looked into the perfect rope length I’d need if I wanted to hang myself.
But there’s one thing I really need to talk about. I suppose this book is supposed to be some kind of social critique, otherwise I don’t know why the narrator would go into so much ranting about the excessive use of social media, about the human disconnection and the sadness it involves. But most of the time I felt just like when I hear somebody that’s clearly trying to deny the advances in the society and technology by reliving their past. I thought we were over regretting the past and we could start building a present by embracing what’s changed. And a 2019 bestseller still doing that makes me a bit disappointed about the stage we reached.
I just think that this killer deserves some justice. If they really thought about such a clean way of killing, they probably were more complex than somebody that just doesn’t want to accept things change.
I’d say it’s a 6.5/10, a fine book to read when you don’t want to worry too much (it’s funny saying this about a book about hundreds of suicides), but don’t get too excited about it being a literary masterpiece. And I’m just fine with that: not everything needs to be a masterpiece so don’t worry if this book is going to be your guilty pleasure. We all know how those work.
A reader has no favourite book 