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Language ArtsOkay, 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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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