One, None, and a Hundred Grand - by Luigi Pirandello (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A hilarious exploration of the relativism of identity from Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature.

When Vitangelo Moscarda's wife tells him his nose leans slightly to the right, his entire world swings off kilter. Loafing about, suddenly estranged from himself, he accosts friends, strangers, and passersby to look closely and confirm: Am I not the self I thought I was? Wandering from mirror to mirror, Moscarda embarks on a dizzying pursuit to see himself as others see him, to root out the stranger within. Searching endlessly for his true self, Moscarda ricochets through insecurity, reclusiveness, self-detachment, and doubt -- resolving, with icy recognition, that "people roll through their lives like stones, complacent, insensate, and closed," locked in an unknown face. Things quickly escalate from pensive reflection to dramatic confrontations as the protagonist disintegrates. With sharp dialogue and comic brilliance, Pirandello dissolves the fixity of perception, challenging us to question the solidity of our own identities and to consider the ways we are each held captive by the gazes of others.

Review Quotes

"The quality of One, No One and One Hundred Thousand as a philosophical novel through and through is striking from the first page to the last . . . marvelously thought-provoking."--Edith LaGraziana

"Pirandello's (1867-1936) 1926 novel . . . 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 . . . 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."--Publishers Weekly

"In 1924, he wrote the novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, his strongest statement on systematic mutual incomprehension and the desire to subtract oneself from other people's controlling narratives."--Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books

"Three writers of the twentieth century have given voice to--and leant their names to--our disquiet, our injuries, and our fear; at the same time, through the catharsis or measure of contemplation, which are among the revelations of art, they have helped us to live by tempering our anxiety and desperation; and I am using this term, tempering, in a musical sense...of striking a more pure, more crystalline, more vibrant note. These three writers are Pirandello, Kafka, and Borges."--Leonardo Sciascia

"To this day, much of his voluminous oeuvre remains untranslated into English or, if translated, out of print. This is a shame. His prose . . . brims with sympathetic, contemporary-seeming characters, some struggling to live true and maintain their dignity in straitened circumstances such as those now befalling so many in the West today . . . If all this doesn't make Pirandello relevant to us now, then what would?"--Jeffrey Tayler, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Pirandello was interested in all forms of artistic representation. Characters, stories, episodes and even extracts of his writing move around from one medium to another in an ongoing process of cross-fertilization .... There is something strikingly modern about Pirandello's self-reflexivity, by turns in and out of the individual's control, which speaks to our times of endless self-making and remaking and to the countless, sometimes conflicting, versions of ourselves we project for others to see. Ours is an era of 'For myself, I am whoever you think I am' taken to the extreme .... Surely now is the moment to commission more fresh translations to mark Pirandello's contribution as novelist as well as dramatist - to do justice to his great contribution to global literature and to revive the work of mutation and cross-fertilization that fuelled it."--Ann Hallamore Caesar, The Times Literary Supplement

"Pirandello paints, but without the Romanticists' sentimental excitement, the cold fury of the cinema actors against the mechanics of their art which steals away their living audience . . . Pirandello forces on us the most bizarre situations without sacrificing the sense of reality one gets from a contemporary milieu."--F. Stringfellow Barr, Virginia Quarterly Review

About the Author

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was a prolific Italian writer most famous for his plays, which inspired the absurdist théâtre de l'absurde movement. An influence on writers and thinkers from Samuel Beckett to Jean-Paul Sartre, Pirandello won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for his contributions to European modernism. His metatheatrical play Six Characters in Search of an Author remains a cultural touchstone for contemporary playwrights.

Sean Wilsey is an author, translator, and documentary filmmaker from San Francisco. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, and his memoir Oh the Glory of It All was published by Penguin in 2005. His film IX XI debuted at the Perth Revelation Film Festival in 2023.