operetta generals and admirals!

"In New York, he is continually struck by details: gloved garbage collectors, orderly traffic, long block of bridal shops in the Bowery, juxtaposed with scenes of the utmost misery, and the impression that everyone looks as though he had stepped out of a film. Broadway is a "luminous fair" whose violent lights stultify him; he realizes he had reached a "new continent," because real smoke comes out of the mouth of a soldier smoking a Camel cigarette in a fifteen-meter-high billboard in imes Square. He admires the magnificent food shops, the women and their bright dresses, and the color of the taxis, which look like insects dressed up for Sunday in reds, greens, and yellows; but he is horrified by necktie shops with a concentration of bad taste that is scarcely imaginable. He is puzzled by the function of the Funeral Home and the fact that cemeteries are private property where space is reserved in advance. Thousands of operetta generals and admirals catch his eye: they are New York's doormen, bell captains, and elevator boys in the big hotels."

Alba della Fazia Amoia: Albert Camus
The Continuum Publishing Co., New York - 1989
pagg. 136-137

catalogazione: una delle librerie in soggiorno