Overview

Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life-only to find that this new existence is as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he left behind, it's too late: his job is gone, his wife has remarried. Mattia Pascal's fate is to live on as the ghost of the man he was. An explorer of identity and its mysteries, a connoisseur of black humor, Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello is among the most teasing and profound of modern masters. The Late Mattia Pascal, here rendered into English by the outstanding translator William Weaver, offers an irresistible introduction to this great writer's work.

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9780946626182

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A new translation of the Pirandello novel of 1904 which first appeared in English in 1923. The novelistic and philosophic ingenuity of the tale of odyssey through illusion is masterfully wry. Mattia Pascal has died twice and now awaits only a third, final death. His first was as a callow youth when he ran away from his wife and his mother-in-law, who claimed a corpse in the mill race as Mattia's, not even bothering to inspect it for his cocked eye. Mattia (a librarian) goes off to Monte Carlo, wins 82,000 lira, whirls through the Grand Tour. But, under the assumed name, he finds himself a foreigner to life, and his new freedom only a new tyranny. Try as he will to remain aloof from conventional ties, life sweeps him into love. But when he is robbed and can't report it without exposing himself, he sees himself excluded from life forever. The shadow of a dead man; that was my life... When a Spanish painter insults him and demands satisfaction, Mattia arranges his second death, a false suicide from a bridge, and leaves for Pisa, then home. Does he return in contrition? No, he arrives in a roaring rage at his wife and mother-in-law, stunning all around him with his new power and self-command. This early work from the 1934 Nobel Prize winner is in the mainstream of his thought and of consequent interest. (Kirkus Reviews)

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