Hello everybody!
Here I am again!
Today, I want to review one of Pirandello’s masterpiece.
“The Late Mattia Pascal”… In Italy, everybody knows this book. What about you?
I admit that I used to have prejudices about this work. When I studied at school for the first time Pirandello and his ideology, I must say I did not like it, at all. But God works in mysterious ways and it so happened that the summer of that year I bumped into this volume.
I was skeptical. I did not want to read it, but I decided to read the first pages anyway.
But when I read the “Foreword”, I was so captured that I could not be able to distance myself the book and I devoured it.
But why?
Those sentences grabbed me:
One of the few things, in fact about the only thing I was sure of was my name: Mattia Pascal. Of this I took full advantage also. […]
It did not seem a lot, to be honest, to me too. But at time I had not realized what it meant not to be sure of even that.
But what is more marked in my mind, what I will never forget is the conclusion of the chapter:
… with the understanding that no one shall open it till fifty year after my third, last, final death.
There you have it, exactly! So far I have died twice (and the Lord knows the extente of my regret, I can assure you): the first time I died by mistake; and the second time I died… but that’s my story, as you will see….
At this point, Pirandello succeeded to stop me from throwing his book away and to make me read it.
But what does it talk about? It’s the story of Mattia Pascal who, after a series of events, a nice day, on his way home after a travel, has got a newspaper on his hands where he read an article: Mattia Pascal commits suicide.
Our protagonist has now the chance to get a new life totally different. And he does not miss such oppurtunity. With the name of Adriano Meis, he travels around the Europe for a year untile he arrives at Rome, where he decides to settle in digs. Here he falls in love, loved back, with Adriana, Anselmo Paleari’s daughter, but he will soon realize he cannot fulfil his dream because Adrian Meis, for the world, DOES NOT EXIST. So, he is forced to take the decision to kill Adriano to go back to being Mattia. And this is exactly what he does. After he has faked his own death, back to his town, he finds out his wife, after two years from her husband’s alleged death, got married again and had a child.
At the end, everyone gets a happy ending, everyone except Mattia Pascal, who, become librarian, spends his life without doing anything in particular.
So, the only man who has had the chance to touch the absolute freedom, who has had the oppurtunity everyone would have to start again his life, he is trapped in life.
The novel, therefore, ends with a perfect pirandellian style.
I would like to “analyse” just one character: Mister Paleari.
This is a charming character: a philosopher in his spare time.
To give you an overview of what kind of character he is, I tell you an anecdote.
A nice day, Anselmo Paleari goes to Adriano to announce that the tragedy of Orestes by Sophocles is at the puppet theatre. But why is he so upset by a puppet theatre? Paleari thinks about just one single possible event: what would happen if the paper sky of the puppet rips open? Orestes would become Hamlet.
Why? I am not the person in charge to reveal it.
Just remember that
The whole difference between the ancient theatre and the modern comes down to that I assure you, Mr. Meis, to a rent in a paper sky!
And, how Mr. Paleari in that scene, I leave you so and and I goes away, pattering along the hall in his slippers.
Dostoevskij
IL CAPPUCCINO 