One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Eridanos Library) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The central character in the novel, a small-town squire, looks in the mirror one day, touches a nostril and feels some pain. His wife tells him his nose tilts to the right, something he had not realized before. Catching sight of his reflection in the mirror again, he concludes that he possesses different personalities. So begins a search to discover his various selves. After a series of bizarre incidents, he is deserted by his wife and is declared insane. The court gives his money to a poorhouse; he becomes its first guest. In the poorhouse, he becomes the "no one"of the book's title.

By being no one, the squire becomes everyone. He can be reborn again and again. "I am I and you are you," the squire, speaking as the first-person narrator of the novel, declares. In the end, he says: "I no longer look at myself in the mirror, and it never even occurs to me to want to know what has happened to my face and to my whole appearance. The one I had for the others must have seemed greatly changed and in a very comical way, judging by the wonder and the laughter that greeted me."

Trying to explain a Pirandello plot is like trying to catch a tiger by the tail or walking with Vulcan on the lava of Mount Etna: dangerous. Put it this way: "One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand" is Pirandellian...

It is an outstanding philosophical and psychological novel, fresh and humoristic, but deep and contemplative at the same time, that deals with the theme of 'identity'. It develops concepts that foresee our contemporary sensibility so well, that after almost a century their validity is perfectly unchanged.

Reality is illusory, relative and subjective, and always becomes the expression of personal interpretations. Communication is made out of subjective distortions, of standardized definitions through `labels' that are attached to persons and situations. And the characters built by these labels end up by having their own lives, in the projection of our ego in the perception of the others, as well as in our occasional will to become what the others want us to be.

But our identity is fluid, in a `continuous becoming'. It cannot be made still, in a definition, if not at the price of losing its dynamic character, or even its transitory reality. Such lack of identification leads each of us to become, in the end, absolutely alone, with our own misperception of ourselves, unknown even to ourselves.

It is a 'cerebral' writing, full of contorted but still delicious meditations that give the reader the chance to recognize himself into the main character of the novel, "Vitangelo Moscarda". The style is however bright and colorful, at times able to admirably convey inner sensations in the description of certain landscapes, at times so immediate and simple in the use of humor and comicity, to effectively entertain the reader throughout the book.