Luigi Pirandello Libros

Serafino is a typical Pirandellian anti-hero, a spectator rather than a participant in the tragi-comedy of human existence. Indeed he has the perfect job for it, that of a film cameraman. Serafino is an observer, an impersonal tool of a new industry based on make-believe. All he has to do is turn the handle of his camera and watch. He has no part in what is going on and is so removed from life that the mauling of an actor by a tiger cannot deflect him from filming the action. The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio is set in Rome circa 1915, partly on a film set, partly in the city.

Renowned for his innovative plays, Luigi Pirandello, an Italian literary giant, transformed psychological analysis into compelling theatre, earning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. His extensive body of work includes novels, hundreds of short stories, and approximately 40 plays, with some written in Sicilian. His tragic farces laid the groundwork for the Theatre of the Absurd. Notably, his first significant work, Marta Ajala, emerged in 1893, followed by his first short story collection, Amori Senza Amore, in 1894.

The great Pirandello's (1867-1936) 1926 novel, previously published here in 1933 in another translation, synthesizes the themes and personalities that illuminate such dramas as Six Characters in Search of an Author.Vitangelo Moscarda ``loses his reality'' when his wife cavalierly informs him that his nose tilts to the right; suddenly he realizes that ``for others I was not what till now, privately, I had imagined myself to be,'' and that, consequently, his identity is evanescent, based purely on the shifting perceptions of those around him. Thus he is simultaneously without a self--``no one''--and the theater for myriad selves--``one hundred thousand.'' In a crazed search for an identity independent of others' preconceptions, Moscarda careens from one disaster to the next and finds his freedom even as he is declared insane.It is Pirandello's genius that a discussion of the fundamental human inability to communicate, of our essential solitariness, and of the inescapable restriction of our free will elicits such thoroughly sustained and earthy laughter.

A masterful collection by a literary giant of the past century, rendered by one of our most esteemed Italian translators

The plot revolves around a theater company interrupted by six incomplete characters seeking a writer to finish their narratives. This unique encounter blurs the lines between fiction and reality, as the characters express their frustrations and desires to be fully realized. The play explores themes of identity, existence, and the creative process, challenging traditional storytelling conventions and engaging the audience in a philosophical dialogue about the nature of art and authorship.