The Late Mattia Pascal

by Luigi Pirandello, Nicoletta Simborowski (Translator)

Overview

"Pascal, a landowner fallen on hard times and trapped in a miserable marriage, runs away from home and wins a lot of money at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile a body has been found in the millrace of his village and it is assumed that Pascal has killed himself. Seizing what looks like a chance to create a new life, he travels to Rome under an assumed name and struggles to invent a different identity which he can inhabit. He fails, returns home, finds his wife has remarried and has to act out the role of being as it were a living ghost. All these tragic events are recounted with verve and wit and comes across clearly in Simborowski's spirited translation from the Italian."
Robert Nye in The Guardian

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781903517994
Publisher:	Dedalus, Limited
Publication date:	06/01/2011
Series:	Dedalus European Classics
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)was born in Sicily in a prosperous middle-class family. After university he dedicated himself to literary pursuits and published, poetry, short stories, a novel and plays. The bankruptcy of his father in 1903 drastically altered his life. His wife became ill both mentally and physically and he contemplated committing suicide. It is against this background that he wrote The Late Mattia Pascal in 1904 which is seen as the beginning of all that is most interesting in his work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934.

Nicoletta Simborowski read Modern Languages at Oxford and then worked in publishing and as a teacher at Westminster School in London.She combines a career as a lecturer in Italian at Christ Church, Oxford with freelance interpreting and translating for television and video. Her translations for Dedalus are: The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello, Abbe Jules and Sebastien Roch by Octave Mirbeau.

Editorial Reviews

Universally recognized as one of the founding figures of modern drama and theater, Pirandello is virtually unknown here as a novelist and short story writer. Written in 1904, this novel touches on some of the themes that reverberate throughout his work: illusion and reality, the enigmas of identity, art and life. The narratorprotagonist is something of a buffoon, a figure out of comic opera, the impoverished son of a once-rich family stripped bare by a villainous swindler of an estate manager. Living a dreary life as an archivist, tired of his dismal marriage, plagued by an intrusive mother-in-law, tormented by creditors, he slips away to Monte Carolo and hits it big. While he is gone, a suicide in his hometown is mistakenly identified as the very same Mattia, who, being an enterprising scamp, changes name and identity, marries anew in adopted territory, fakes his own suicide and returns to the orginal scene as his old self, to the consternation and confusion of everyone. Comedy descends to farce and slapstick here and there; but no harm done. Essentially the novel is a lark, with some shadowy overtones; and the portrait of town lifethe ``biographies of worms,'' Mattia saysis drawn in acid. (April)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Pascall abhors his life until he accidentally is declared dead and gets to start over under a new name. When that existence also flounders, he realizes he didn't have it so bad. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"The novel is very funny, often hilariously so. It is also moving, disturbing, tragic. Pirandello's saw comedy residing in that 'fundamental contradiction...between human aspiration and human fraility,' a contradiction that induced 'a certain perplexity between weeping and laughing.'" -- The New York Times Book Review

Janette Turner Hospital

Three writers of the twentieth century have given voice to—and leant their names to—our disquiet, our injuries, and our fear; at the same time, through the catharsis or measure of contemplation, which are among the revelations of art, they have helped us to live by tempering our anxiety and desperation; and I am using this term, tempering, in a musical sense…of striking a more pure, more cristalline, more vibrant note. These three writers are Pirandello, Kafka, and Borges.
— Leonardo Sciascia

Very funny, often hilariously so. It is also moving, disturbing, tragic. For Pirandello saw comedy residing in “the fundamental contradiction … between human aspiration and frailty,” a contradiction that induced “a certain perplexity between weeping and laughing.”
— The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher