One, None, and a Hundred Grand

An ordinary man suffers an existential crisis in Nobel laureate Pirandello’s fascinating 1926 novel, freshly translated by Wilsey. Vitangelo Moscarda spirals after his wife, Dida, points out that his nose leans slightly to the right, which he’d never noticed before. He becomes obsessed with the gulf between how he sees himself and how others see him and ponders the fundamental instability and unknowability of the self. Having retreated into solitude, he develops a theory, based on the fact that his last name means maggot, that there are “a hundred thousand men all with that single name, Moscarda... living inside this poor body of mine.” To prove his point about the chaos of existence, he performs a series of outlandish stunts, bequeathing his home to an ex-con, attempting to close the bank his late father owned, and falling in love with an unhinged woman who subsequently shoots him. Pirandello marshals the dizzying material with a masterful hand, providing clarity no matter how far his narrator stumbles in the dark, as when Moscarda appeals to the reader, “have faith that I’m constantly struggling to provide you with the same reality that you provide for yourself; that I long for the you in me to be the you that you see when you’re thinking of yourself.” Those with a taste for philosophical fiction ought to snatch this up. (Oct.)