One, None, and a Hundred Grand
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
A hilarious exploration of the relativism of identity from Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature.
This uproarious new translation of One, None, and a Hundred Grand delivers the defining work of Italian existentialism to an English speaking audience—in all its madcap glory. The novel’s hero is a wealthy twenty-four-year-old naïf who considers himself “a regular guy,” despite being cursed at birth with a surname that’s “ugly to the point of cruelty: Maggot. Destined to become a fly, with its sour, spiteful, annoying drone.” The story tracks Maggot’s reaction to an offhand act of matrimonial malice. Was he aware that his nose leans to the right? He is struck by the full force of the fact that he does not, and cannot, know how others see him. So he sets out on a quest “to coax forth the many Maggots living inside my closest companions, and destroy them one by one.” It’s a premise, played straight, that acts as an inspired metaphor for the rightward-leaning madness of the 20th century, and a catalyst for a series of absurd scenarios and comic set pieces on par with the very best of 21st century observational comedy—imagine Curb Your Enthusiasm in fascist Sicily. Pirandello splits the atom of the self and detonates a tiny moment into “a catastrophe that supervened the very machinery of the cosmos.” Perception and identity are leveled in a literary performance the Nobel laureate regarded as a “complete synthesis of everything I have done and the wellspring of what I will go on to do.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An ordinary man suffers an existential crisis in Nobel laureate Pirandello's fascinating 1926 novel, freshly translated by Wilsey. Vitangelo Moscarda spirals after his wife, Dida, points out that his nose leans slightly to the right, which he'd never noticed before. He becomes obsessed with the gulf between how he sees himself and how others see him and ponders the fundamental instability and unknowability of the self. Having retreated into solitude, he develops a theory, based on the fact that his last name means maggot, that there are "a hundred thousand men all with that single name, Moscarda... living inside this poor body of mine." To prove his point about the chaos of existence, he performs a series of outlandish stunts, bequeathing his home to an ex-con, attempting to close the bank his late father owned, and falling in love with an unhinged woman who subsequently shoots him. Pirandello marshals the dizzying material with a masterful hand, providing clarity no matter how far his narrator stumbles in the dark, as when Moscarda appeals to the reader, "have faith that I'm constantly struggling to provide you with the same reality that you provide for yourself; that I long for the you in me to be the you that you see when you're thinking of yourself." Those with a taste for philosophical fiction ought to snatch this up.
