Description
Fiction. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. Luigi Pirandello's extraordinary final novel begins when Vitangelo Moscarda's wife remarks that Vitangelo's nose tilts to the right. This commonplace interaction spurs the novel’s unemployed, wealthy narrator to examine himself, the way he perceives others, and the ways that others perceive him. At first he only notices small differences in how he sees himself and how others do; but his self-examination quickly becomes relentless, dizzying, leading to often darkly comic results as Vitangelo decides that he must demolish that version of himself that others see.
Pirandello said of his 1926 novel that it "deals with the disintegration of the personality. It arrives at the most extreme conclusions, the farthest consequences." Indeed, its unnerving humor and existential dissection of modern identity find counterparts in Samuel Beckett's Molloy trilogy and the works of Thomas Bernhard and Vladimir Nabokov.
"Pirandello's novel is philosophical and metaphysical, a close examination of the fundamental question of how we and others see (and delude) ourselves about ourselves (and others) ... A playful, meditative novel, enjoyably seeing its narrator consumed by his obsession."—M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review
Author Bio
Nobel Prize winner, Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 in Girgenti (now Agrigento) in Sicily. He became an internationally renowned playwright, novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. His fictional and theoretical work was deeply influenced by recurrent themes, such as the juxtaposition of life and form, the sharp distinction of the comic from the humorous, and the illusion of reality. His love for his native Sicilian dialect also frequently returned in his poetic, fictional, and theoretical works. Pirandello died in 1936.
Author City: Rome ITA
William Weaver (1923-2013) was a renowned translator who brought some of the most interesting Italian works into English. He translated Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Svevo, Umberto Eco, Alberto Moravia, and Elsa Morante, to name just a few, as well as Pirandello's The Late Mattia Pascal. An expert on opera, Weaver lived for many years in a farmhouse in Tuscany and later became a professor of literature at Bard College.
Author City: USA