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The Late Mattia Pascal (Italian: Il fu Mattia Pascal ) is a 1904 novel by Luigi Pirandello. It is one of his best-known works and was his first major treatment of the paradox form/life. The narrator-protagonist is a young Italian man who, after his father's death, sees his family ruined by a mean swindler, the man who was supposed to help them. Mattia finds himself in a miserable social condition. He feels that his promising youth has vanished into a dreary dead-end job and a unhappy marriage: his wife doesn't love him, his mother-in-law, with whom he lives, hates him. So Mattia leaves to MonteCarlo, where he wins a lot of money in a casino. On the train back, after 12 days, he learns on reading a newspaper that, in his villages, everybody thinks he is dead: an unrecognizable body has been found in his well. Incredible! He has a second chance to begin a new life. But it's not easy to get it done. He escapes from his form, his shape a sort of social identity that reveals to be a cage, and tries to begin a new life without any social identity, but .. ..

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9781725846135

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Pirandello was born in Sicily in 1867. His father was a prosperous sulphur merchant who sent him to study commerce at the local technical institute, but soon he left to study oratory and literature. Later, after his graduation, Luigi attended universities in Rome, and in Bonn, where he earned a doctorate in Romance philology. He married Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a business partner, who suffered an emotional collapse when his father's sulphur mines, in which Pirandello was heavily invested, were destroyed in a flood. Consequently she became hostile and was institutionalized. Nevertheless this period culminated in the production of his two greatest dramas, Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) and Enrico IV (Henry IV). Pirandello quickly became one of the major literary figures in Italy. It worths remembering that Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. He died in 1936.

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