One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“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.

Have you ever been around a madman? It is unpleasant, disturbing, frustrating and in the end wholly futile. I much prefer a congress with the zoo animals or my neighbor’s dogs at the dog park than to seek any meaningful interaction with the insane. Yet this is what the world wishes for us these days – the glorification of the random, the meaningless. The out of place. A toilet bowl nailed to a two-by-four, this is what post-modernism has given us in the name of art and beauty. In its efforts to destroy our creator who made all things in His image and under His perfect order we have been given instead Dionysus, Nietzsche’s God of drunkenness and ritualized insanity.So why – why does our post-modern world revel in, glory in the insane? Why do we choose the path of Friedrich Nietzsche instead of G.K. Chesterton? Why do we give effort of inquiry to the baffling works of Piet Mondrian while eschewing Ivan Shishkin as ‘passé’ – the tired trivialities of a bygone era. “A beautiful painting? What fun is there in that?”I recently finished “One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand” by Luigi Pirandello. To be fair, I have not read anything else by this Nobel-prize winning playwright and novelist. So perhaps I should not have started with “One, No One” (I certainly will endeavor to pick up one of his plays soonest, there might be something there). However, “One, No One” was gibberish. Oh, I have gone to Goodreads and the literary critics to attempt to ascertain what others see in this – one of those books which would never have been published had the author not previously been made famous by other works. And I have found many erudite reviews and analyses attempting to sound cultured and advanced, muddying the waters of their shallow minds in the desperate attempt to appear deep, profound; post-modern all in our sad world where beauty and lyricism and the evocations of greatness can no longer find a place. The fact is, this novel is non-sense. The plot, simple and un-compelling, begins when the protagonist’s (Vitangelo Moscarda) wife tells him his nose is slightly crooked, listing to the right. This discharges in the unstable mind of Moscarda a series of breakdowns as he challenges his own reality and wonders who he is and who others are and how we can really know, leading him to mistakes and evils and onward to his eventual insanity and his wife’s trial (and acquittal, due, in Moscarda’s own words, to his own insanity). The reviewers seem to think there is something meaningful in a short story about the descent into delirium. But the ‘theater of the absurd’ taken to this degree only causes befuddlement – like Albert Camus’ joyful existentialism fells the trees in order to pave the way for Nietzsche’s despotic nihilism.But back to my question: why? Why would humanity do this to itself? Is there not enough of a mess in human life, that we would spend our time and our money seeking out more of it? Why would we go to the unschooled ignoramus under the tree to seek out common ‘wisdom’ which comes from the unstudied; or traverse the distance to the madhouse where the inmates are doing ‘art therapy’ to obtain (for a fee) the works of their troubled minds? It could be said (though I’m sure many will fight me on this) that the point of modernity was the search for unity and coherence of beauty (in a world emerging from a millennium of sadness and darkness and violence) – a sense of comfort in its wholeness and universality; while post-modernism seeks only a racket, the chaos and mayhem into which everybody fits, a table around which all can find a place even if they have no right to be there. There is a scene in Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” in which she describes an artist guild founded by the main antagonist Ellsworth Toohey. The purpose of the guild is to “muddy the waters” to present ugliness as beauty, dissonance as lyricism, evil as morality, and eventually insanity as clarity. Toohey’s own weakness and sense of inadequacy cause him to demean the lines of beauty in order that through the fuzzy thinking everybody – even the talentless – might be called great. That was his final revenge on the world. I think Toohey would laugh at “One, No One”. But it is not funny; for if he wins, then how will we ever strive for perfection in perfect creation again…? – if it is imperfection we seek, we certainly shall find it, for it is everywhere!! If the commonplace is what we glorify, who then will choose the harder path of beauty and forms? And if we lose our ability and our right to seek cohesion in the extraordinary, then the weak who want to prey on our minds in order to lay low our buildings and destroy our laws will find it easy to enslave our wives and put our children to work for their pleasure. How do I know this? I see it every day in the world around me.G.K Chesterton’s dying words are made all the more prescient today: “The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.” What side do you choose?

This book was listed as "Used - Good"I will only be able to read this book once because each page falls out of the binding as I turn it.Great book so far, but this book should have not been sold and thrown away instead.

Very nice quality and very excited to finish reading

Book came in perfect condition just in time to wrap as a Christmas gift. Very interesting read! Thanks!

An amazing exploration of the conundrum of human existence, with the author's characteristic laconic humour.

This style of writing is exactly how the dialogue in my head plays out!

Great book highly recommend.

Mislead completely by the reviews. Was hoping to get a better translated version of the novel by Luigi Pirandello. However this turned out to be a book about an art exhibition! Not even remotely related to what I was hoping for. However the reviews were suggestive of this being a novel by Luigi.

It won’t change your life but it certainly opens a few doors to thoughts you’d not usually have. Brilliantly translated and Pirandello has totally justified the time it took to write. Deserves more publicity!

this was completely the wrong book, the reviews are incorrect for this book, this is a book about a art exhibit

Great book. Capturing and very interesting from a psychological point of view.Good translation.

what can i say.. I love Pirandello! this is a must read