Customer Reviews

The Late Mattia Pascal

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This is a novel for those who read to get transpotred into another world and simply enjoy a great story! If you like Calvino you'll love "Pascal". It's a very funny depiction of what happens when one (here, Pascal) tries to reinvent oneself and become something else. Like Calvino, it incorporates irreverent humour, mystery and wonderful descriptions. But Pirandello is more traditional in his prose than Calvino--so if your offset by Calvino's randomness, don't worry, Pirandello is more focused.

Italian author, winner of the Novel Prize in 1934, Luigi Pirandello is better known for his plays, forerunners of the theatre of the absurd. In this novel, the main character Mattia Pascal faces an economic downfall and a marriage without love. He decides to escape from this situation and in a stroke of luck wins a fortune in Monte Carlo. He takes a new identity, gains total freedom, shams death but the ghosts of his past existence, and the discovery of true love will spoil his new life.
The plot is neatly constructed and the dialogues between Mattia Pascal and some of the characters are enlightening, expressing Pirandello's philosophical outlook on life as well as reflecting biographical elements. The author is concerned with the ambiguity of truth and reality, the problem of identity and illusion. For him self-identity only exists in relation to others, as much as man is a social creature, unfortunately bound to social conventions. Man creates his own reality and lives in a world of illusions, always bound one way or the other to the past. The resulting paradox is that illusion may often become more real than reality!
Mattia Pascal is unable to cope with his total freedom which strucks him as being shapeless and aimless. Only the love he feels for Adriana will help him brake away from his suffocating mask. Upon returning to his former town he finds his wife has remarried and he is destined to become the shadow of a dead man.
Pirandello held a pessimistic outlook on life, believeing that his time was one of distress and darkeness (early 20th century), democracy was nothing more than tyranny disguised as freedom, and philosophical speculations nothing more than a product of our imagination.
"When death comes perpetual night will great us after the misty daylight of our illusion, or rather, we will be left to the mercy of Being, which will only have shattered the vain forms of our reasoning."

This novel is about the identity of the individual, and the possibilities and limits of self-reinvention. By failing to transform himself into someone else, Mattia Pascal remains the same person, but radically changed from his experience. Oh, but it's not so complicated. Mattia Pascal is a good-for nothing- junior who, along with his also-spoiled brother, lose the fortune inherited from their father. Besides losing his fortune, Mattia is forced to make a disastrous marriage. And then, along comes a big and most unexpected chance to run away and become someone else. I won't spoil anything. Just read it and you will find an amazing story. Pirandello's writing is easy. The introduction to the real knot of the story is a little long, but it is absolutely necessary to situate the plot, and moreover, it is very funny. Pirandello's style fluctuates between irreverent and outrageous irony, and melancholic reflections on fate, identity and man's place in the world. Far from being boring, it has extremely funny moments of dark humor (check his confrontations with his mother-in-law). So, it is an extremely recommendable book, because it is intelligent humor with a reflection on life. If you really get to love the story, as I did, you'll end up asking to yourself: "Who the hell am I?".

Okay, so that may sound awfully obvious, but my goodness! Of course it's not funny! It's not supposed to be funny! When is Pirandello ever funny? If anything, he may be ironic, but he is never slapstick and certainly wrote nothing to be considered "a lark." The author of the article in Publisher's Weekly ought to be taken out and shot in the most General Dreedle sense of the term. Il Fu Mattia Pascal is anything but a beach read and if you were disappointed in it because it was not cheap entertainment, your disappointment is probably due to the misinformation you received from a review as miscomprehending as that of Publisher's Weekly. Il Fu is an examination of the modern treatment of identity. It is an existential examination of society's abandonment of those who seek to live an "authentic" life. It is a piece of LITERATURE, not a DaVinci Code or a Mary Higgins Clark mystery. These may be enjoyable books, but for a different reason. Read Pirandello with expectation that you will be made to think, to question, and you will not be disappointed.

This book is very sad...it tells the story of a man who can't cope whit life's responsibilities and whit himself. A strange accident causes him to be believed dead, and he thinks he can assume a new identitiy and take on a new life. But he can't escape himself, and his new life shall be as unsatisfying and full of disillusions as the first. The clou of the book is the tragic melancholy of the seance...when he himself is evoked as his own spirit.Existentially spooky!

A brilliant, tragi-comic existentialist examination! An enjoyable and thought-provoking commentary on the human condition, identity, art, and life, death and what lies in between.

I would definetely recommend this novel. I enjoyed it very much. It helped me to come in contact with my innerself, and it made me think of things that i had never given any thought to before.

I can't agree with the preceding review. We must have read two different books. I read Pscal at fourteen and I found nothing funny in it. All I found was a hardly decent, terribly slow story, told in the usual boring language so dear to Italian novelists (I read it in Italian, by the way... Maybe the translator did Pirandello a great service, who knows?). It is a book that lacks life entirely. Although the story is plausible, there is no oxigen in it. Besides, it repeats pirandello's themes over and over again. OK, we know, according to him it is impossible for a man to know himself and not to have less than ten personalities at a time. We have heard this song over and over again! I mean, Pirandello dissected the same bloody theme for at least a thousands times. Why the hell couldn't he explore other themes and dilemmas as well? That is the chief problem with Italian literature: it bores readers to death.