One, No One & 100,000 by Kevan Houser
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.Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and poet. Born to a wealthy Sicilian family in the village of Cobh, Pirandello was raised in a household dedicated to the Garibaldian cause of Risorgimento. Educated at home as a child, he wrote his first tragedy at twelve before entering high school in Palermo, where he excelled in his studies and read the poets of nineteenth century Italy. After a tumultuous period at the University of Rome, Pirandello transferred to Bonn, where he immersed himself in the works of the German romantics. He began publishing his poems, plays, novels, and stories in earnest, appearing in some of Italy's leading literary magazines and having his works staged in Rome. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), an experimental absurdist drama, was viciously opposed by an outraged audience on its opening night, but has since been recognized as an essential text of Italian modernist literature. During this time, Pirandello was struggling to care for his wife Antonietta, whose deteriorating mental health forced him to place her in an asylum by 1919. In 1924, Pirandello joined the National Fascist Party, and was soon aided by Mussolini in becoming the owner and director of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma. Although his identity as a Fascist was always tenuous, he never outright abandoned the party. Despite this, he maintained the admiration of readers and critics worldwide, and was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781644670316 |
| ISBN 10 | 1644670313 |
| Title | One, No One & 100,000 |
| Author | Luigi Pirandello |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Isbn Services |
| Year published | 2019-03-12 |
| Number of pages | 198 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |