Ci provo…

Ci provo…


This is a short novel in the form of a monologue, characterized by extensive philosophical reflections revolving around the concept of individual identity and the singularity of the self.


From the initial moment when the protagonist notices a crack, suggested by a casual observation, in his self-awareness compared to the perception of others, he plunges into a progressive obsession that will lead him to the brink of madness in the intention of consciously disintegrating the image that each of his acquaintances, relatives and others, reflects back to him: another Vitangelo Moscarda, then another and another, perhaps a hundred thousand.


The decomposition of his own personality thus becomes the fulcrum of his fixation, in a painful and self-inflicted mental and material journey that contemplates the renunciation or even the sabotage of the dearest affections, respectability and economic stability, which by the way had not been acquired with particular effort but directly inherited from his father.


The ending, perhaps liberating or perhaps annihilating, finds Moscarda now in a state of zero social stability, a sort of ascetic in a blue shirt relegated to the hospice built through the donation of the proceeds of his liquidated business.


In conclusion, my subjective impressions of the novel (as a somewhat scattered and inexperienced reader of Pirandello's work) identify a theme of such interest as to arouse multiple reflections, a somewhat difficult and laborious style that sometimes puts concentration to the test, and finally, perhaps a secondary element but one that struck me, a great ability to evoke with just a few strokes the characters of both the protagonists and the places that form the backdrop to the predominant and torrential elucubrations of Moscarda's fixations.

**"The Complexity of Identity and the Search for True Self"**

The epigraph "Non è altro che questo, epigrafe funeraria, un nome. Conviene ai morti. A chi ha concluso. Io sono vivo e non concludo. La vita non conclude. E non sa di nomi, la vita." sets the stage for a profound exploration of identity. The author describes himself as being like a tree, a cloud, or the wind, constantly evolving and changing. He goes out every morning to keep his spirit fresh, before the sun dries up the moisture of the night and blinds him.

Then, the story of Moscarda is introduced. He is a "usurajo" in conflict with the terrible truth that he is a different person for each of the many personalities in his country, and even for himself. He realizes that he coexists with a hundred thousand selves, none of which is the true him. There is the Gengè of his wife, the do-nothing of his father-in-law, and the usurer of the town. Moscarda rebels against this conflict, seeking to destroy the many selves, a destruction that will ultimately affect his entire life.

Pirandello presents us with a universal truth that we cannot help but support and be almost scared of when reading. At a certain point, the author feels as if he is going crazy along with poor Moscarda, understanding his inner dilemma. We are not one, nor will we ever be one as we see ourselves, but we are also no one because of our inability to fix a unique way of being that makes us visible to others. However, we are also a hundred thousand, different in the eyes of a hundred thousand others; a hundred thousand of us who are transfigured in the face of a new stranger.

We are all one, no one, and a hundred thousand, but Moscarda, through his final madness, finds a compromise. He stops thinking and is transfigured into nature. This is the only way not to be part of that finite and transfiguring nature to which we are unfortunately doomed.

I cannot claim that I understood this novel

and thus be impressed by it or not, because in fact

I didn't understand it. The narrator is a man to whom his wife said "May God forgive her

One of the most beautiful things I've read by Luigi Pirandello is this precious philosophical gift. It's a reality clothed in imagination, and an imagination not far away that dwells within us and rises to the surface of life, sometimes sketching for us.

I can't write a review for fear of spoiling the latest, but the general idea revolves around what a person discovers suddenly, that he is not alone in reality. Because he sees himself in one way, and others see him in different ways, and these are the images that he doesn't perceive about himself, nor does he know his image in the eyes of others.

The surprise is that all the images or viewpoints that others have of him have made him into different copies of himself, but none of these images have a connection to him!

So all the impressions that others have taken of him are not true for him, because he already has a completely different image of himself as he imagines!

And from this discovery comes the strange title of the novel, "One, and It Is My Two Personalities That I Know About Myself."

And "No One," which are the images that others see me with and I don't know, they are unknown images to me, it's the (No One), the unknown being that I don't know about myself and others think of me as, it's the impression that others have of me and I don't know it, and I'll never know it... On the other hand, this (No One) is more real than my true personality that I know about myself, because it's the image that others deal with me based on.

And "One Hundred Thousand," which are my images in the eyes of everyone I know, and each one of them sees me with a different personality, so there have become many copies of me in the mind of everyone who knows me.

This is a highly philosophical matter, and it has a great echo in philosophical thought, especially in Kant, Sartre, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty.

Just because a famous author wrote it, this doesn't necessarily mean the book is a good one.

The same concept is repeated a thousand times. I constantly found myself thinking, "Yes, yes, I understood what you mean. Stop saying it over and over again."

However, for pleasure, it has an average of 4 stars. The same concept is repeated 40,000 times. It only needed 10 pages to explain it, and that would have been fine. Instead, it's a whole useless and boring book.

It's disappointing when a book fails to live up to expectations, especially when it's by a well-known author. The excessive repetition can make the reading experience tedious and unenjoyable.

One would hope that authors would strive to present their ideas in a more engaging and diverse way, rather than relying on endless repetition.

Maybe it's time for readers to be more critical and not be swayed solely by the author's reputation.

After all, a good book should be judged on its own merits, not just because of who wrote it.

**"A Book Filled with Rich Philosophical Pity, Without Mercy"**

A book with rich philosophical pity, without mercy. I randomly reread what I had noted for Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying". Among other things, I noted:

"There are times when I am not at all sure if one has the right to decide when a person is crazy and when not. There are times when I say to myself, none of us is entirely for certain, just as none of us is entirely sane, and this as long as the rest of us judge in one way or another. Because it is not so much what each person does, but the way the majority judges him at the time he does it."

And in this way, out of nowhere, the fantastic communication between the works occurs!

We could say that Pirandello wrote THE book of empathy - a word that has been somewhat misused by trembling-fingered ethicists and "socially sensitive" people who draw conclusions about everything. In "One, No One and One Hundred Thousand", there is clearly a philosophical background that drives the narrative. The story begins with the protagonist Moscatelli looking at himself in the mirror and his wife telling him that his mole is growing a little to one side of his face. This will be the pretext for a series of observations into the inner human condition, for a search beyond the appearances, those that are most often demanded. Pirandello multiplies our pairs of eyes and reveals something that, okay, we don't learn from him! And yet, most of the time we have the theory but it is light-years away from the actions. If I decide on a beautiful day to change jobs, slamming the door behind me, to give my possessions to those who don't have and to go live in a hut in Réunion, or any action other than what logically "I am", they will take me for crazy. Because no one had ever thought before that I, the one they know I am, could do it. Therefore, everything becomes immediately illogical. Yet I ask: "Illogical?.... It doesn't answer, so it's logical."

The certainty we have through personal perception and perceptiveness, the "I" everywhere and always, the extreme egotism, the measure of all things with the unit of measurement being the "I", this is a big lie, let's finally admit it!

"The presumption that reality, whatever it is for you, must be and is similar for all others."

Okay, Pirandello tells us, you know this. However, he continues:

"And why, then, Lord of Powers, do you act as if you don't know it? Why (damn my luck - my own) do you continue to believe that the only reality is yours, this present one, and you are surprised, you get angry, you shout that your friend is wrong, who, no matter what he does, will never be able to acquire, the poor wretch, the same psychological disposition as yours?"

Since we know that if we take a second round of a memory of ours, or if we return to a place that was once dear and beloved to us, we may encounter there a graveyard of memories, a nothing or something completely different? Wasn't it true that at one time this place/situation/person caused us excitement? Or perhaps it isn't true that now it causes us absolutely nothing or something completely different? Were we the same then and now? Today and tomorrow? Or perhaps we have the right to doubt and judge everything continuously, since "we know"? We are, however, also imprisoned in our past, condemned to the unjust prison of our past actions and forced to carry this sentence. "And it weighs on you, around you, like a dense atmosphere, suffocating, the responsibility that, for those actions and their consequences, unwanted or unforeseen, you have taken on. And how can you now free yourself from these?"

Can one thing negate another? An artist can: 1) do the worst in his personal life, 2) have created a unique and unrepeatable artistic work.

"But if I go back again to the psychological state I was in then, when I saw the eyes of the world above me and it seemed to me that I was in a terrible attack thinking that all those eyes were giving me an image that was surely not the one I knew but some other one that I could neither know nor prevent, instead of telling them, the crazy ones, I wanted to do them, like rolling in the streets or flying over them with a dancing step, closing one eye, sticking out my tongue and making faces with the other... And instead I walked so seriously, so seriously, I, in the street. And you too, what beauty, you all walk so seriously..."

We are therefore constructions, projections of ourselves and others, expectations, complexities. The "steadfastness of the will" and the "fidelity of the emotions" only need to be a little shaken, "to change at some moment or to change at least a little, and our own reality is gone!"

At some point in our lives, we are like a pebble in the middle of a circle that squeezes us: the perimeter is a thousand pebble-characteristics and qualities that others (but also we ourselves!) have involuntarily assigned to us. And none of these characteristics and qualities do we recognize in ourselves. How did we get to this point? Where is our own will and do we come to the point of saying: I don't recognize myself, this is not what I wanted, I wanted something else and I ended up here, everything is a mistake. (Where the fox limps, John Gray would answer about the will.) We are one, no one, one hundred thousand. And to get into our clothes, all of our clothes, it is burdensome and difficult and often suddenly, like a flash, like... madness. There is violence to become the one, it takes courage and preparation for the worst. But it is also the only way to achieve the best, to become what you want to be. But perhaps it will hold on a little longer! Damn it, Pirandello!

So to the question "Who are you?", the only correct answer seems to be "That 1-0!"

Today, perhaps more than ever, plunged into the world of images, we don't even see faces, but their constructed images, and we rush to conclusions and judgments. And the suitcase of false certainties through the images goes even further. The protagonist Moscatelli wants to hide, taking his dog for a walk and talking to him. "Do you want to know why I came to hide here? Because the world looks at me, Bibi. The world has this bad habit, and it can't break it. So we should all stop carrying around in the street, for a walk, a body exposed to be looked at. Ah, Bibi, Bibi, what should I do? I can no longer bear to be looked at. Not even you. I'm even afraid of how you're looking at me now. No one doubts what he sees, and everyone goes into things, sure that they appear to others as they are for him; we can imagine later if there is anyone who thinks that you animals that look at people and things with these quiet eyes exist, and who knows how you see them, and what you think about them. I, Bibi, have lost, have lost forever my own reality and the reality of all things in the eyes of others! As soon as I touch, I lose. [...]"

Moscatelli hides in a quiet neighborhood; we hide in the busy world of images, in the chaos of the possibilities of selective projection. And whatever he wanted came out.

God is within us. It is our small inner personal god who guards our own feelings, our wills, our dispositions at one moment or another. An action that comes from this real god of ours, however, is easily likely to be characterized as crazy. However, the other God, the one we build houses (churches) for

"This God there was no risk that Firpo or Quantro (i.e. the others) would dare to call him crazy."

Twelve points, God, and yours from Pirandello, his kisses.

The book also sent him onto the street of Beckett's Godot, where words, language prove to be completely insufficient to describe but mainly to be a complete means of communication between people.

Did this book make me a better person? What does "I am a good person" mean, world, you who know so much? No. I just better understood that I am also a Moscatelli: sometimes one, sometimes none, sometimes one hundred thousand. Just like you are. Everything flows. So, give me a break...

2,5⭐️

Sanki 223 sayfa boyunca tek bir cümleyi anlatıyor gibi... Başkalarının gördüğü ben ile ki onların da herbiri birbirinden farklı, benim gördüğüm ben çok farklı kişiler... It's as if throughout 223 pages, it's telling just one sentence... The me that others see and the fact that each of them is different from one another, the me that I see is very different people...

Daha çok sevmeyi beklediğim bir kitaptı. Başlangıcını ve gidişatını çok sevdim ama bir yerde koptum okumadan ve mümkün değil bir daha içine giremedim. Zamanlama yanlıştı diye düşünüyorum. It was a book that I expected to like more. I really liked its beginning and progression, but at a certain point, I stopped reading and it's not possible for me to get back into it again. I think the timing was wrong.

1⭐️ - 5⭐️ yıldız hangisi verilmiş olursa olsun şaşırmam açıkçası. Çeviri mi beni içine almadı diyeceğim ama Şadan Karadeniz çevirilerine laf edilecek bir çevirmen değil

Alongside "The Man Who Ended," in my adolescence, I would have been enraptured by this reading. The (crazy) problem of identity is treated in a philosophical and humorous way (don't they go best together?), revealing layer after layer in a sharp disclosure of intimacy. So personal that I found myself many times.

It is a window, not a solution.

"I began, first from afar, then closer and closer, to turn around each pebble that I saw and I was amazed that others could pass me by without noticing that pebble, which for me, in the meantime, had taken on the proportions of an insurmountable mountain, nay, more, of a world in which I could have lived without problems. I remained like that, motionless at the first steps of so many roads, with my spirit full of universes, or of pebbles, which is, in fact, the same thing. But I had not at all the impression that those who had taken it before me and had covered the whole road knew, in essence, more than me. They had taken it before me, without any doubt, all as brave as riders, but then, at the end of the road, each had found a cart: his cart. They had crowded around it with great patience and now they were pulling it after them. I was not pulling any cart; and therefore I had neither harnesses nor riding glasses. I saw, surely, more than they. But of going, I did not know where to go."

And the others? The others are not at all inside me. For the others, who look from outside, my ideas, my feelings have a nose. My nose. And they have two eyes, my eyes, which I do not see and they see. What connection exists between my ideas and my nose? For me, none. I do not think with my nose and I am not attentive to it when I think. But the others? The others, who cannot penetrate inside me to see my ideas and see, from outside, my nose? For the others there is such a close connection between my ideas and my nose that if the former, let's say, were very serious and the latter had a comical shape, they would burst out laughing.

Holding it thus, I fell into another torment: that I could not, while living, see myself doing the most ordinary things; to see myself as others saw me; to put my body in front of me and see it living, as if it belonged to someone else. When I looked in a mirror, a blockage occurred in me: not a trace of spontaneity, any gesture of mine appeared artificial, constructed. I could not see myself living.

The idea that others saw in me one who was not the self that I knew — one whom only they could know, looking at me from outside with eyes that were not mine and that created for me an appearance destined to remain forever strange to me, although it existed through me, although it was mine for them (a "mine" therefore that was not for me!), a life in which, although it was mine for them, I could not penetrate — this idea no longer gave me peace. How to tolerate in me this stranger? This stranger who was myself for me? How not to see him? How not to know him? How to remain condemned to carry him always with me, inside me, in view of others, while for me not?

Reflections 1) — that I was not for others what I had believed until then that I was for myself; 2) — that I could not see myself living; 3) — that, not being able to see myself living, I remained a stranger to myself, that is, one whom others could see and know, each in his own way, and I could not; 4) — that it was impossible to put this stranger in front of me to see and know him; I could see myself, but not him; 5) — that my body, if analyzed from outside, was for me like an apparition of a dream, a thing that did not know that it was living and stood there, waiting for someone to take it into possession; 6) — that, just as I took my body into possession, to be sometimes as I wanted and felt, so could anyone else take it into possession, to give it the desired reality; 7) — that, in the end, that body, in itself, was at the same time nothing and nobody, since a current of air could make it sneeze today, and tomorrow take it with it. Conclusions These two for now: 1) — that I began to understand, finally, why Dida, my wife, called me Gengè; 2) — that I proposed to myself to find out who I was at least for the closest ones, the so-called acquaintances, and to amuse myself by trying to destroy, to their chagrin, the image that they had of me.

Only that I do not pretend to say anything new. I only ask you: "Why, my God, do you act as if you did not know? Why do you continue to believe that the only reality is yours, that of today, and you wonder, you get angry, you shout that your friend is wrong, he, who could not, whatever he did, have, poor thing, the same disposition as you?"

Here we are in the countryside. A sunset has tired our feet. It is natural that illusions and disappointments, pains and joys, hopes and desires should seem to us desolate and transient, in the face of the feeling inspired by the things that remain and survive them, impassive. It is enough to look at the high mountains beyond the valley, very far away, blurred on the horizon, in the pink and diaphanous light of the evening.

Look: lying on your back, throwing up your gray felt hat, you become almost tragic, you exclaim: "O, human ambitions!" So it is. For example, what victorious shouts for the man who, like your hat, has set out to fly, to play the bird! Look, on the other hand, how a real bird flies. Have you seen it? With the most natural ease and grace, accompanied by a spontaneous trill of joy. Think now of the clumsy and noisy machine and of the fear, of the deathly unease of the man who wants to play the bird! Here, a fluttering and a trill; there, a noisy and ugly-smelling motor, with death in front. The motor breaks down, the motor stops: goodbye bird! "Man," you say lying in the grass, "stop flying! Why do you want to fly? And when have you flown?" You are wonderful. You say this now, here, because you are in the countryside, lying in the grass. Get up, go back to the city and, as soon as you arrive, you will immediately understand why man wants to fly. Here, my dear, you have seen the real bird, which really flies, and you have lost the sense and value of the false wings and of the mechanical flight. You will immediately regain them there, where everything is false and mechanical, adaptation and construction: another world within the world — a manufactured, combined, assembled world, a world of artifice, of deformation, of adaptation, of lies, of vanity, a world that has sense and value only for man, who is its creator.

Do you believe that you know yourselves, without constructing yourselves in some way? And that I could know you, if I did not construct you in my way? And you me, if you did not construct me in your way? We can know only the thing to which we succeed in giving a form. But what knowledge can this be? Is that form the same as the thing itself? Yes, for me, as for you. But no, for me, not the same as for you: I do not recognize myself in the form that you give me, nor you in that which I give you. And the same thing is not the same for all, being able to change for each of us, and indeed it changes, all the time. And yet, there is no other reality outside of this, that is, of the momentary form that we succeed in giving to ourselves, to others, to things. The reality that I have for you consists in the form that you give me; but it is reality for you, not for me. The reality that you have for me consists in the form that I give you; but it is reality for me, not for you. And for myself I have no other reality than the form that I succeed in giving myself. But how? Precisely by constructing myself. Ah, you believe that only houses are constructed? I am always constructing myself and constructing you too, and you do the same. And the construction lasts as long as the material of our feelings does not crumble and as long as the cement of our will lasts. Why do you believe that you are so much recommended a firm will and constancy in feelings? It is enough for the will to waver a little, and the feelings to change a little, and goodbye to our reality! We immediately realize that it was nothing but an illusion.

Unfortunately, I have never known how to give a form to my life. I did not want to be in a certain way, proper only to me, either because I had never encountered obstacles that would arouse my will to resist and to affirm myself in front of others and myself, or because of my spirit, ready to think and feel also the opposite of what it had thought and felt a little while before, that is, to decompose, to disintegrate, through assiduous, often paradoxical reflections, any mental and sentimental form. Or, finally, due to my nature inclined to yield, to let itself be at the discretion of another, not so much out of weakness, as out of indifference and an anticipatory resignation with regard to the troubles that would follow from this. And here, finally, they have followed! I did not know myself at all, I had no reality for myself, I was almost in a state of continuous modeling, almost fluid, malleable. Others knew me, each in his own way, according to the reality that they had given me, that is, each saw in me a Moscarda who was not me, since I was nobody for myself; as many Moscards as there were of them, and all more real than me who, I repeat, had no reality for myself.

I was talking to a friend; nothing unusual. He was answering me, I saw him gesticulating. He had his usual voice, I recognized his gestures. And he, listening to me, recognized my voice and gestures. Nothing unusual so far; but I was thinking that the tone that my friend's voice had for me was not at all the same as that which he knew, or perhaps he did not know it at all, being for him the sound of his voice; and I was also thinking that his physical appearance was as I saw it, as I gave it to him, looking from outside, while he, speaking, surely did not have in mind any image of his own body, not even that which he usually recognized in the mirror. O, God, what was happening to me then? Was the same thing happening with my voice? With my physical appearance? I was no longer an indistinct self who spoke and looked at others, but one whom others looked at, outside of them, and who had a voice and some features that I did not know. I was for my friend what he was for me: an impenetrable body that stood in front of him and that he represented through very well-known features for him, but with no significance for me. It is very true that I did not even think of them while speaking, and anyway I could not have seen them, but for him they meant everything, forming his representation of me, of one among so many: Moscarda. Is it possible?

"You have been and remain a fool... yes, a poor naïve without a mind, who turns around your thoughts, never stopping at one. And you never manage to make a decision, because you turn around it and examine it so much that in the end you fall asleep, and the next day you open your eyes, you see it in front of you and you no longer know how it could have come to your mind when yesterday it was sunny and this air was so clean."

Time, space: necessity. Fate, luck, events: all, courses of life. Do you want to exist? That's it. In the abstract you cannot exist. You must seize existence in a form and for a time embody it in it, here or there, in this way or that. And everything, as long as it lasts, carries with it the punishment of its own form, the punishment of being this way and not being able to be otherwise.

That's the trouble; or the joke, if you prefer to call it that. We perform an action. I sincerely believed that we fully recognized ourselves in it. We realize, unfortunately, that this is not the case, that the action always belongs only to one of the many that we are or could be, when, by an unfortunate accident, we suddenly remain as if hung, suspended; we realize, therefore, that we do not fully recognize ourselves in that action, and that it would be a great injustice to be judged only according to it, to be hung, suspended by it, on the pillar of infamy, for the whole life, which we would have consumed in that single action. "But I am also this, and that, and the other!" we begin to shout.

We are very superficial, I and you. We do not enter into the heart of the joke, which is very deep and radical, my dear friends. And it consists in the fact that existence necessarily acts through form, which is the appearance that it creates for itself, and to which we give the value of reality. A value that changes, obviously, according to how existence appears to us in a certain form or action.

Because a reality has not been given to us and does not exist, but we must make it ourselves, if we want to exist. And it will never be one for all, but always changing, infinitely. The capacity to deceive ourselves that the reality of today is the only true one, if it supports us on the one hand, on the other hand it pushes us into an endless void, because the reality of today is doomed to be discovered tomorrow as an illusion. And life does not stop. It cannot stop. If it stops tomorrow, it's over.

I will try to give you, not to have any worry, the reality that you believe you have, that is, I will want you for me as you want yourselves. It is not possible, from now on we know this very well, because, however much effort I make to imagine you in your way, it will be "a way of yours" only for me, not "a way of yours" for you and for others.

Totally, because it was enough to set in motion, just a little, in play, my will to represent myself differently from one of the hundred thousand in which I lived, for all my other realities to change in a hundred thousand ways. And, necessarily, this game, if we think about it well, had to lead me to madness. Or, rather, to something horrible: the consciousness of madness, fresh and clear, gentlemen, fresh and clear like an April morning, clear and precise like a mirror.

And, finally, do you want to do with me too, yes or no, this experiment, once and for all? That is, to penetrate the terrifying farce that lies beneath the natural calm of daily relationships, of those that seem to you the most ordinary and normal, beneath the calm appearance of the so-called reality of things? The farce, my God, because of which you get angry every five minutes and shout at the friend next to you: "Forgive me, but how can't you see this? Are you blind?" And he doesn't, he doesn't see it, because he sees something else, when you believe that he must see what you see, what seems to you. He sees, on the other hand, what seems to him, and therefore for him the blind are you.

But you have never wanted to do anything! — Yes. But not out of frivolity, you see. On the contrary! We are getting too much into the subject. And you cannot do anything, believe me, if you get too much into a thing.

I was too much filled with the fear of entering the prison of any form.

People, you see, feel the need to build a house also for their feelings. It is not enough for them to have inside, in their heart, the feelings; they want to see them also outside, to touch them. And then they build a house for them." For me it had always been enough to have inside, in my way, the feeling of divinity.

But you always want to see yourselves. In every gesture of your life. It is as if you had in front of you, all the time, your own image, in every action, in every movement. And perhaps the inability to tolerate comes from this. You do not want the feeling to be blind. You force it to open its eyes and see itself in a mirror that you always put in front of it. And the feeling, as soon as it sees itself, freezes. One cannot live in front of a mirror.

I go out every morning, at dawn, because now I want to keep my spirit like that, fresh like the dawn, with all the things that are revealed now, that still smell of the nocturnal freshness, before the sun dries their humid breath and blinds them.

IL SENSO VOSTRO E IL SENSO MIO: "ABBIAMO CREDUTO D'INTENDERCI; NON CI SIAMO INTESI AFFATTO."

One of the most incredible, multifaceted, complex, and many-sided characters in literature: Vitangelo Moscarda. This anti-hero, more unexpected than Zeno, more in crisis than Mattia Pascal (his close relative, given the common paternity), has deeply touched me, raising continuous questions still without an answer.

Pirandello is also a philosopher: a philosopher of life, who focuses his investigation on how we face - or do not face - life, on our relationship with the Other and with ourselves, on the divergence of views and on the distortion to which each of us is subject when we see - and analyze - those around us, but also when we look in the mirror, when we try, in short, to see ourselves live. And Vitangelo Moscarda tries this, but enters an irreversible crisis when he discovers that he is not one, but precisely, no one - a body at the disposal of others' impressions and defenseless - and a hundred thousand other Moscardas, each filtered through the eyes of those in front of him. Life does not conclude, everything is in becoming, and our protagonist does not intend to be fixed in multiple personalities that do not represent him.

Like Mattia Pascal, Vitangelo decides to subvert the pre-established order and is, for this reason, mistaken for a madman, since he irreversibly upsets and alters the image that is had of him in the town of Richieri. Does he really go mad, in the end, in his pantheism? Or, as with Zeno, are the "sane" the ones who are sick? Pirandello "does not conclude", as it should be if one wants to represent life, but he gifts us with scenes that are the pivot of his conception of humor. A smile, bitter on the lips, and the key to continuous questions and reflections behind. The Sicilian writer is, in my opinion, the incarnation of this strange, absurd, unsteady, hysterical century that is the Twentieth.

All this is presented to us with the usual, Pirandellian, clear and cerebral style. A continuous monologue on the threshold between novel, confession, and philosophical tale; brilliant on every single page, presented with a relatively simple eloquence that allows us to read the book in one breath and to clearly understand from the beginning which will be the useful tricks to open up Pirandello's thought in front of us.

I have loved this book - which I would define as gigantic for the scope and novelty of the arguments - more than The Late Mattia Pascal for large stretches, and this says it all. Thank you, then, to Pirandello and to Vitangelo, because books like this leave you something for life, ancient questions on which the reader will wonder every day even just by looking in the mirror, discovering one of his flaws; questions that are not left abandoned among moldy pages, but that make us know the world. Or at least, with them, our author tries, in the wake of the great literature of the Short Century.

In the distant future, school anthologies might change, removing all the useless dozens of pages of Pirandello's mental meanderings and replacing them with stories rich in sentiment. This has really made me angry. Period. Take it as a subjective opinion. I had liked "The Late Mattia Pascal". But this one, I couldn't stand it. It seemed like a load of rubbish to me. Repeating an interesting concept for 200 pages that could have been expressed in two. Thanks, but no. There is no story here. In the face of the novel. It's a philosophical speculation on the theme of masks and personalities, that's all. Even if I had been interested, after page fifty I would have become bored anyway.

I will postpone reading this book to an unspecified time, or rather, until it is translated in a better way.

This decision is based on the current state of the translation. Although the book may contain valuable content, the quality of the translation can significantly impact the reading experience.

By waiting for a better translation, I hope to be able to fully understand and appreciate the author's ideas and message.

In the meantime, I will focus on other books and continue to expand my knowledge and vocabulary.

I believe that patience is key when it comes to reading translated works, as a good translation can make all the difference in bringing the original text to life.

A book that delves deeply into the captivating, indeed overwhelming, concept of the vast gulf between how one perceives oneself, how others view one, and (if that can be determined at all) the way one truly and objectively is. Hence the one, one hundred thousand, and no one, respectively (if I understood correctly).

After an extended period during which the first-person protagonist grapples with and tries to make sense of this notion, he arrives at the conclusion that it is impossible, or rather, futile, to attempt to conform to this or that image that (he believes) different people might have of him. This is because ultimately, the image never aligns with how he perceives himself, nor with how yet another and yet another person perceives him. The main premise, repeated time and again, is that we can never truly get inside someone else's head and discover, for real, what they think or feel.

This realization - which, to me, seemed like a rather ordinary idea - takes such firm root in the protagonist's mind and shakes his existence so profoundly that he decides to cast off all these ultimately false identities that the outside world, including his closest ones, may impose on him and strip himself down to the most basic, naked essence that would remain if he were to do so. What this essence is, if we set aside the perceptions of ourselves by others or what we perceive ourselves to be, involves a process of exploration that is tumultuous and violent, culminating, towards the end of the book, in a major rupture, followed by a transition to a calm state of being. It is better for you to read and ponder this for yourself.

Looking back on this entire journey, I think that somehow love comes to play an important role. Could it be that at a certain point, what Pirandello might have wanted to convey is that true love is perhaps the only way through which a true glimpse of the bare essence can be achieved, like a spark of electricity jumping from one's conscience to another's, so that the other person knows the way you feel, truly knows you.

It's a decent book, though not exactly "interesting" in the sense that it keeps you eagerly turning the pages or holding your breath for more, at least not for me. I also found the first part - in which Pirandello develops his idea of the incongruity among diverse perceptions and the impossibility of relating - overly long and even tiresome. I kept thinking - okay, okay, Pirandello, I understand - your meaning is not my meaning, the I that I see is not the me that you perceive, or the person that a third party might perceive. So let's move beyond this premise. This slight impatience with the first part might have been exacerbated by Pirandello's writing style, whereby he directly addresses the reader, repeatedly asking him or her to see what he means:

Consider this carefully. Wasn't my wife kissing, on my lips, a man who was not I? On my lips? No! Mine, indeed! To what extent were they mine, truly mine the lips she was kissing?

Finally, should I dare to suggest this - okay, so I got the sense that the story gradually veered towards a development that reminded me a bit of what I've read and watched about the precepts of Hinduism and Buddhism - that a major cornerstone on the path to liberation is the ability to renounce attachments - all attachments, to all earthly pleasures, to all the people close to you, and so on. There seemed to be a hint of that idea towards the end of the book.