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Title: One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Eridanos Library, No 18) by Luigi Pirandello, William Weaver ISBN: 0-941419-74-6 Publisher: Marsilio Publishers Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A soliloquy fun to read
Comment: Rarely a soliloquy is so interesting and fun to read. Pirandello has masterfully achieved both. This is the story of man searching through his monologues to find out himself as seen by others and as he assumes he really is wihout what he has assumed all his life. Each brief chapter is a exploration of the different aspects of the man's reality, examined now from a detached position. The reflections are serious and profound, but they keep a good sense of humor through out the whole narrative. It is a recommended reading for anybody.
Rating: 5
Summary: My 100-thousand faces in the others' perception....,
Comment: After 13 years since I read this book for the first time, it still remains one of my favorites. I find it so dense of deep meanings, and so pleasant to read, that every now and then I'm still captured to read a chapter here and there, when I happen to have it in my hands. I will try to describe it in a few lines, despite that a comprehensive review of the book would require much more effort, which such a masterpiece would certainly deserve.
It is an outstanding philosophical and psychological novel, fresh and humoristic, but deep and contemplative at the same time, that deals with the theme of 'identity'. It develops concepts that foresee our contemporary sensibility so well, that after almost a century their validity is perfectly unchanged.
Reality is illusory, relative and subjective, and always becomes the expression of personal interpretations. Communication is made out of subjective distortions, of standardized definitions through 'labels' that are attached to persons and situations. And the characters built by these labels end up by having their own lives, in the projection of our ego in the perception of the others, as well as in our occasional will to become what the others want us to be.
But our identity is fluid, in a 'continuous becoming'. It cannot be made still, in a definition, if not at the price of losing its dynamic character, or even its transitory reality. Such lack of identification leads each of us to become, in the end, absolutely alone, with our own misperception of ourselves, unknown even to ourselves.
It is a 'cerebral' writing, full of contorted but still delicious meditations that give the reader the chance to recognize himself into the main character of the novel, "Vitangelo Moscarda". The style is however bright and colorful, at times able to admirably convey inner sensations in the description of certain landscapes, at times so immediate and simple in the use of humor and comicity, to effectively entertain the reader throughout the book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Turmoil in the Mirror.
Comment: Admirers of Pirandello's plays will be grateful for the new translation of the author's 1926 novel, "One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand," for it illuminates the background of Pirandello's theatrical works.The novel includes similar legerdemain; the reader observes the author playing with time, people and places. It reflects his cross-eyed way of looking at life and society, later seen in his major plays, "Six Characters in Search of an Author," "As You Desire Me" and "Tonight We Improvise."
The central character in the novel, a small-town squire, looks in the mirror one day, touches a nostril and feels some pain. His wife tells him his nose tilts to the right, something he had not realized before. Catching sight of his reflection in the mirror again, he concludes that he possesses different personalities. So begins a search to discover his various selves. After a series of bizarre incidents, he is deserted by his wife and is declared insane. The court gives his money to a poorhouse; he becomes its first guest. In the poorhouse, he becomes the "no one"of the book's title.
By being no one, the squire becomes everyone. He can be reborn again and again. "I am I and you are you," the squire, speaking as the first-person narrator of the novel, declares. In the end, he says: "I no longer look at myself in the mirror, and it never even occurs to me to want to know what has happened to my face and to my whole appearance. The one I had for the others must have seemed greatly changed and in a very comical way, judging by the wonder and the laughter that greeted me."
Trying to explain a Pirandello plot is like trying to catch a tiger by the tail or walking with Vulcan on the lava of Mount Etna: dangerous. Put it this way: "One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand" is Pirandellian...
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Title: The Late Mattia Pascal (Eridanos Library) by Luigi Pirandello, William Weaver ISBN: 0941419444 Publisher: Marsilio Publishers Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Loveless Love by Luigi Pirandello, J. G. Nichols ISBN: 1843910225 Publisher: Hesperus Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Oil Jar and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) by Luigi Pirandello, Stanley Applebaum, Stanley Appelbaum ISBN: 048628459X Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: Eleven Short Stories/Undici Novelle: A Dual-Language Book by Luigi Pirandello, Stanley Appelbaum ISBN: 0486280918 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 June, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello ISBN: 0452010829 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1952 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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