Recognized as one of the founding figures of modern drama and theatre, Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello is not so well known in the English language as a novelist and short story writer, but this humorous affair written in 1904 shows he could work wonders in both fields. He touches on some of the themes that reverberate throughout his work as a dramatist: those being illusion and reality, and the enigmas of identity.The narrator here (that would be Mattia Pascal) is something of a wazzock, a risi...

That's a fair and often funny reflection on life and freedom, which can only appreciate in close relation with men.I had a little trouble finishing this book due to the somewhat dated mess of the whole affair, but worth a visit.

Have you ever thought about going to a place where nobody knows you and starting a new life as an entirely new person?Luigi Pirandello makes Mattia Pascal live out this fantasy. Great misery has befallen Mattia Pascal and there is no silver lining in sight. Unable to think of anything else to do, he runs away leaving everyone and everything behind. A few days later on his way back home, he discovers that while he was away a dead body was mistaken for his and he has been declared dead in his town...

Before you read another book (or finish the one you're reading), before you see another movie, before you contemplate any work of art, get yourself to the nearest bookstore or library or wherever you prefer to look at books, and find Pirandello's Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal), wherein you will find "Avvertenza sugli scrupoli della fantasia" ("A Warning on the Scruples of the Imagination"). Just read those 4 or 5 pages, which are not actually part of the novel, and you will begin t...

This is an interesting contrast with 'Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself', which I read a short time ago. In Sheppard Lee a man flees debts and a generally unsatisfactory, pointless life by magic. That is, dying in an accident, he finds he can magically inhabit another body whose ‘owner’ has just died. However, he takes on the character and life circumstances of said dead man, which in time, for each of the sequence of bodies he adapts, becomes intolerable.Mattia Pascal, in contrast, doesn’t die b...

Enjoyable, if not exceptional. Pirandello is witty & amusing, and even when the book shifts into its more blatantly philosophical segments, it's still a pleasure to read. That said, it's dated -- not in content, necessarily, but in impetus -- but not so badly that it completely detracts from the reading experience. A dark but fun meditation on identity & faith/fulness -- and worth it, mostly.

The Late Mattia Pascal is such a great book that when a reader writes a review he wonders (rightly) what he can add, which has not yet been said, to one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The reflection is correct, but after reading it you really want to put your thoughts on paper.The Late Mattia Pascal is undoubtedly a milestone in world literature. Why did I re-read a book from 1904 in 2020? For various reasons: the first is that a work like this must be read several times in lif...

Right in the first few pages the author tells us this is the story of a man who “died twice." Our hero, or anti-hero, is going nowhere in late 1800’s Italy. He earns a pittance as the librarian in backwater Italian town. He lives with screaming kids, a wife who has lost interest in him and a viscous mother-in-law who hates him. One day while out of town, he learns from newspapers that the decomposed body of a suicide victim down by the watermill in his home town was mistaken for him. He is free!...

R.I.P. Mattia Pascal.Mattia Pascal was a man born to endure adversities in every walk of life. He was a dutiful son who saw his family affluence ruined by a benefactor after his father’s death and his mother’s existence fading into rueful shadows. He was a concerned husband and a doting father even in the thorniest situations that brought demoralizing repercussions in his marital life. The only thing Mattia was ever sure about in his burdensome life was his name-Mattia Pascal. It was his solita

"And we often gladly forget that we are infinitesimal atoms; instead, we respect and admire one another and are even capable of fighting for a scrap of land or of grieving over certain things which, if we were really aware of what we are, would seem incalculably trivial." Perhaps there is a time in each of our lives when we had thought about what would have happened if we just disappeared from our current life? Shred our name, face, and identity and start anew somewhere else, in anoth

Luigi Pirandello is not only known by his works in prose but for his work as a playwright and this second trait is visible in this work and in other similar works (like 6 characters in search for a writer) . As his stories are often times filled with originality and are extremely dramatic. But also depict a weird reality that calls our attention.In this narrative the protagonist, Mattia Pascal, finds himself in a life that gives him no pleasure. With a wife and a mother in law badgering him cons...

It has been such a pleasure to re-read this Italian classic. Mattia's narrative is hilarious and thought-provoking.

Pirandello's most famous book brilliantly exposes weaknesses and strenghts of the Modern Man through a brilliant, entertaining story whose surreal nature weirdly makes it more realistic.Featured in my Top 5 20th Century Italian Novels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn6D59...

4.5 stars

It was my first book of Pirandello’s and it raised my curiosity about other ones too :). I enjoyed very much the story, the character study, the telling of the story and the –often philosophical - meditations, the humor: indeed everything!I liked the idea of the story: a man is constrained and defined in the same time by the society he lives is, the name he wears, and cannot live freely without a past. It made me think of all the new beginnings I often wish for, the memories and experiences I ch...

Mattia Pascal thinks he has a chance to cut all the laces that bounds him to the world, and live in a state of complete freedom. But soon he discovers there's no full life and no freedom outside the boundaries imposed by society, unless you accept a life of fear and solitude.A classic, timeless novel (that I probably should have read in high school...). On my edition there's a post-scriptum from Pirandello in which he reports of a real case he found in a newspaper, 20 years after publishing his