One, None and a Hundred Thousand

Nice
Love it

A different feel
It’s indeed a riveting, beguiling and hypnotizing subject, so to speak. However, the book has adrift extensively and I believe it’s the translation to be charged for that.Nevertheless, Samuel Putnam has done a massive work with his translation and we can’t discount his work on it, yet the subject is so much deep that a confusion and skepticism is inevitable.A book not to be read amidst a busy schedule!My Verdict:The book is a magnet with its early chapters slowly losing it all the way and then regaining it slowly towards the end.Don’t try it, unless you have some spare time due to the deep, boggling, thoughtful and perplexing subject it tackles. You may end-up questioning yourself!

Blank pages
Received incomplete book with blank pages.

The Idea that someone can look at you and see a completely different person from the person you see in the mirror was something Ive found myself thinking about quite frequently. I’d always act differently around different people because I knew that people come to different conclusions from the same statements and I didn’t like it when someone would expect a different reaction from me in the same situation.So when I heard about the concept of the story I knew I needed to read it.I’ve only really read about 8 books full through in my life and the way this book is written on top of the story is one of the things I found amazing. Having been started to be written sometime in 1970s and Translated from Italian I believe I expected it to be odd. The writing is far different from other books I’ve read and I love it.

Bought as a Christmas gift so can’t really say if it’s a good read. Sounds good from the blurb though:)

“One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand” is so well-constructed, each section flowing smoothly into the next, it’s as if the author penned all one-hundred-sixty pages in a single, uninterrupted creative burst. Remarkably, it’s just the opposite: Luigi Pirandello worked on this short novel on and off over the course of fifteen years, beginning at age forty-two and ending at age fifty-seven. And it isn’t as if Pirandello ordinarily worked at a methodically slow pace. Hardly. His output is phenomenal – during those same fifteen years, at the peak of his creative powers, he wrote hundreds of short stories as well as dozens of plays. The fifteen years to complete this novel speaks to how much care, attention and reflection Pirandello gave the subject, his lifelong preoccupation: the nature of identity.Ah, the nature of identity. Do you reflect on the fact that you experience you from the inside and other people experience you from the outside? That’s right, the outside, as in how you look, how you speak and how you act. Or, stated slightly another way, your looks, speech and action independent of your inner thoughts and feelings. There’s just one and only one person blocked from experiencing you from the outside – you yourself. Sad but true: you can’t stand apart and be an outsider to yourself. Does this bother you? Probably not or not all that much. Well, it certainly bothers the novel’s narrator, Vitangelo Moscarda, bothering and weighing on him to the point of obsession.Humor is laced throughout, right from the first page when at age twenty-eight Moscarda is informed by his dear wife that his nose tilts slightly to the right, quite the revelation since he has always been under the distinct impression he had, if not a handsome nose, then most certainly a decent nose. Reacting as if he were a dog and his wife just stepped on his tail, Moscarda spins around: “My nose tilts?!” Moscarda runs to the bathroom, slams the door and for the next hour scrutinize his face in the mirror.Later that very same day, when a friend pays a visit to discuss a specific matter that might involve him personally, Moscarda cuts him off midsentence and asks if he, in fact, is looking at his nose. So we have the first push leading to a progressively more rapid downhill slide, as Moscarda confesses: “This was the beginning of my sickness. The sickness that would quickly reduce me to conditions of spirit and body so wretched and desperate that I would surely have died of them or gone mad if I had not found in the sickness itself (as I will tell) the remedy that was to cure me of it.”True, we can’t stand outside ourselves but through the power of fiction, in one telling scene, Luigi Pirandello splits Moscarda right down the middle: a Moscarda sitting alone in his study and a Moscarda standing in the corner as objective outsider questioning, probing and pointing a sometimes ironic, sometimes accusing finger. We watch as both Moscardas take center stage in a short novelistic variation of his famous play, acting out their own “Two Characters in Search of an Identity,” as in, when we read: “Why do you go on believing the only reality is your reality, today’s, and you are amazed, and irritated, and you shout that your friend is mistaken, when, try as he may, poor thing, he will never be able to have, inside himself, poor thing, your same mood.” The fact that we humans construct our own identity as a builder builds a house, a construction that cannot be fully communicated to others, even one’s spouse or closest friends, begins to drive Moscarda berserk.And the obverse, how other people construct their own version of his identity for themselves is an unavoidable truth Moscarda refuses to accept, particularly the way his wife Dida has constructed his identity as Genge, her little Genge, a little, loveable fool. Ahhh . . . unacceptable! On top of this, how the two men running the bank his father founded, Quantorzo, the manager, and Firbo, the councilor, likewise think him a harmless fool. And the people in his small city? Since Moscarda benefits so directly and handsomely from the business of the bank, they think him a usurer. A usurer! Now he really has reason to be driven berserk.Throughout the first half of the book, Moscarda keeps his deep and unending inquiries into the nature of his own identity to himself, which is perfectly fine since, in truth, people don’t give a fig about his self-examination but simply want him to continue adhering to accepted social conventions, including acting with civility when dealing with business people in a business office. But there’s the rub: it’s this very conventional civility that has created all the unacceptable social identities of him formed by other people. Thus, Moscarda aims to put into practice his first experiment “in the destruction of Moscarda,” that is, he yearns to destroy the identity all those other people have of him as both fool and usurer.What follows when he pays a visit first to the office of the notary Stampa and then to his bank to confront Quantorzo and Firbo are two of the most hilarious scenes I’ve ever encountered in literature. Rather than saying anything more specific (you will have to read for yourself) just think of another example: a modern day business office with several dozen men and women reading files, answering phone calls, writing reports. Its midafternoon and one of their longtime coworkers revolts against his dull, uptight, establishmentarian identity – he makes his grand entrée wearing a full-length yellow leotard with bells on his ankles, proceeds to execute backward and frontward flips before dancing around the office tossing daffodils. Well, of course, you can think of acting in such a bizarre fashion and get away with it as long as you keep it to yourself and your imagination. However, if you actually perform such a stunt publicly just once – as we all know, one time is all it takes – you will immediately be labeled as mad, fired and perhaps even arrested.What is the nature of the self? Does your own construction of identity put you in a box? Do you recognize your authentic self in the roles you take on? Likewise, does the identity others form of you restrict your freedom? And how about society as a whole? Is the social construction of identity corrosive and even an invasion of privacy? Is to live a “normal” life in our modern world in any way dehumanizing? I am reminded of the novel “Nausea” by Jean-Paul Sartre as well as other existential fiction by such authors as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht and André Malraux. But with Luigi Pirandello’s novel, the story, existential to its core, is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, reminding me of “Twelfth Night” and that yellow stockinged prancing Malvolio. Thank you, Luigi. Highly, highly recommended.