As with Laurence Sterne's TRISTRAM SHANDY, Pirandello's 1921 masterpiece, SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR, was well ahead of its time. It confronts issues in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, postmodernism (structuralism and deconstruction) as well as prefacing experimental theater, metatheater, and performance art. Pirandello's work is a nearly flawless play which breeches the topics of self-identity (a la Descartes), truth and illusion (before Albee), and aesthetics (questioning the legitimizing factor in Aristotle's theory of catharsis). Furthermore, it forces the audience--as too many works of art fail to do--to think without lapsing into philosophic didacticism. Highly recommended.

Pirandello had writer's block. Luisa felt sorry for him. "Just write whatever's in your head", she said, "That's what you're always telling me. Everyone who's ever written a play-- I suppose that leaves out the critics and the university professors--knows that YOU don't write the play, you let the CHARACTERS write the play. Here", she said, "have a glass of wine. It'll help relax you." Two days later, when he was done, Luigi took the manuscript over to Alphonse, the literature teacher. Alphonse declared, after scanning it, "You've written a masterpiece!" "Really?" said Pirandello, "I mean, of course!" Alphonse stood up and gestured grandly with his arms, saying "Ah, the metaphysical ramifications! Reality and the imagination! You've started Postmodernism!" So Luigi did a little dance and headed home to bed.

He must be around here somewhere. Let me see, hello? Mr. Reviewer? Ms. Reviewer? How I am I supposed to start this? I guess I am a review for the Luigi Pirandello play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author." What am I supposed to say about it? I guess I could say that it is a wonderful piece about the search for truth. A reflection of the human experience. Dazzled and question ridden, on a journey to nowhere. But I haven't even read the thing! Mr. Reviewer? Ms. Reviewer? Tell me what it's about so I could have some idea to tell the readers out there. What? I can't hear you. Pirndello's best play? A post modern triumph? An easily stageable highway? Substitute for butter? What? I give up, you wicked person. Find someone else to be your slave, I am going to sleep now

I was lucky enough to have Ms. Gieri as my Italian cinema teacher last year at the University of Toronto and have her book as one of the classes' texts. This book covers so much ground yet manages to remain focused and insightful. Gieri is truly passionate about her work and research and it shows.

This book is a great version of these classic tales. Being a dual-language text makes it an excellent aid to Italian language study. It is a must-read for lovers of Italian literature.

Luigi Pirandello was one of the greatest Italian writers, certainly one of the best of the twentieth century. At the age of sixty-eight, he met the beautiful and vivacious Marta Abba, a lovely young actress. Though he was old enough to be her father, Pirandello fell in love with Marta, and she remained his muse, his confidante, and his emotional focus.

His letters reveal the many facets of his personality. Some readers might be a little weirded out by the intensity of his feelings for Marta (especially since she never entirely returned them), but many years in the future it's clear that even if she didn't exactly return his feelings, she did care about him, liked him, respected him, and appreciated his feelings about her. "To me he was like a god," she is quoted as saying, even though she got to see all his flaws. And Pirandello's feelings are not those of a dirty old man falling for a much younger woman -- he's revealed, even in old age, as being a very passionate and intense person.

In his letters, he often talks about making her a famous actress, and how the two of them would reform the theatre. The foreword written by Benito Ortolani includes his descriptions of meeting Marta herself, in the 1980s, and what she had to say about "the Maestro." Unfortunately there aren't any pictures.

The relationship between Pirandello and Marta was a unique one, a mishmash of unusual feelings. Definitely worth the read.

Eric Bentley's translation is fantastic. The first play, "Right You Are" is worth the price of the entire book. Pirandello's intellect and dramatic skill are awesome, as is Bentley's devotion to their rendering in English.

The english translation of this genius from Sicily is good, and the non-italian reader can appreciate the wonderful writing skill of Pirandello. His was not a "madness", though, even if many of the stories have a kind of wearyness. Anyway, they're among the greatest short stories ever written.

This short book by Pirandello is a quick read, but if you're like me the ideas will stay with you. Pirandello explores the nature of personal identity and the disconnect between self-image and the views that others have of us. It's not a great book, but it is a very good one and is definitely worth the afternoon spent reading.

After 13 years since I read this book for the first time, it still remains one of my favorites. I find it so dense of deep meanings, and so pleasant to read, that every now and then I'm still captured to read a chapter here and there, when I happen to have it in my hands. I will try to describe it in a few lines, despite that a comprehensive review of the book would require much more effort, which such a masterpiece would certainly deserve.

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.

Admirers of Pirandello's plays will be grateful for the new translation of the author's 1926 novel, "One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand," for it illuminates the background of Pirandello's theatrical works.The novel includes similar legerdemain; the reader observes the author playing with time, people and places. It reflects his cross-eyed way of looking at life and society, later seen in his major plays, "Six Characters in Search of an Author," "As You Desire Me" and "Tonight We Improvise."

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...

We're all familiar with the dramatic device of the "play within a play" from Shakespeare (for instance, the device is used in Hamlet). But Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello had a specific use for the concept; he wanted to demonstrate the fine line that separates reality and fiction. He did so most famously in the play Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The play opens with a theater company getting ready to begin a rehearsal. As the director tries to bring some order to the proceedings, six people walk in off of the street looking for an author. They want someone to dramatize their sordid true life story. The tale that they unfold is in fact so melodramatic that the director has his troupe start acting out the six characters and repeating their lines. Meanwhile, the six quibble with the actors' interpretations and with the reproduced dialogue and even argue with the director over whether it is possible or appropriate for anyone other than the six to play themselves.

The premise and structure of the play are amusing and thought provoking. One can only imagine how Pirandello would react to the permutations we see spun out today with reality tv and instant tv movies based on real events, even those we've all just witnessed on live tv like the OJ trial. In fact, just recently on the X-Files, Scully and Mulder were working with a police force which was being filmed for the live action show COPS. Fictional characters pretending to be on a "real" show, but the players on the "real" show are fictional for this episode... He would have loved it. But ultimately the actual content of this play seems to be totally superfluous. The ingenious set up is the whole point and so it ends up resembling one of those Saturday Night Live skits that doesn't know when enough is enough. It all makes for an interesting thought experiment but a somewhat tedious, though blessedly brief, drama.

GRADE: C+

"Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello, is a really remarkable work of drama. The English version by Eric Bentley is published as a Signet Classic. The translator's introduction notes that the play premiered in Rome in 1921.

In "Six Characters," a dysfunctional family confronts a theater director and his whole company. They challenge the director to turn their story into a play--a "painful drama."

This richly ironic play deals with many issues: the relationship between life and literature; the limitation of words as tools of communication; sexual transgression; authority and art; secrecy and shame; the fractured, shifting nature of personal identity; the relationship between an author and the characters he/she creates; and more.

This is truly a play of ideas; it's a constantly shifting intellectual house of mirrors. But Pirandello never loses sight of the emotional issues of human shame, pain, and interpersonal alienation. The play is full of great lines; my favorite is spoken by the director: "There's no author here at all."

It's amazing to think that (at the time of this review) this play is more than 80 years old. When I look at the contours of popular culture in the decades since this play premiered in Rome, it seems that Pirandello was as much a cultural prophet as he was a literary genius. "Six Characters" seems to prefigure such phenomena as reality TV shows (like "An American Family" or MTV's "The Real World") and films which explore the shadowy line between fiction and reality (like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Scream 3"). After all these decades, "Six Characters" remains a fresh, compelling, and relevant theatrical masterpiece.

Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author" premiered in Rome in 1921 to audience shouts of "Maricomio!" ("Madhouse!"). Perhaps few of the theatregoers realized that the "madhouse" they had witnessed was a watershed in the history of drama. While many of the innovations of "Six Characters" may now seem commonplace, Pirandello's innovative, iconoclastic masterpiece marked a break from traditional dramatic structures and stage settings, a break which enabled twentieth century drama to develop along self-reflective imaginative lines much different than its predecessors. As Eric Bentley, the play's translator, notes in his introduction to this edition, "this was the first play ever written in which the boards of the theatre did not symbolize and represent some other place, some other reality."

"Six Characters" is set in a theatre where a director, his stage manager and a group of actors are about to rehearse another of Pirandello's plays, "The Rules of the Game". The curtain is up, the stage is empty of props and background, and the lights illuminate the bare wall at the back of the stage. It is an austere setting, a kind of theatrical analogue to the blank sheet of paper an author faces each day he sits down to write.

Suddenly, this austerity, this mundane theatrical rehearsal, is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of six characters--a father, a mother, a son, a stepdaughter, a boy, and a little girl. They are six characters who have lives, who have stories to tell, but whose dramatic text has not been written. They need an author. As Pirandello says in his 1925 introduction to the play: "Every creature of fantasy and art, in order to exist, must have his drama, that is, a drama in which he may be a character and for which he is a character. This drama is the character's raison d'etre, his vital function, necessary for his existence."

The play proceeds, with the six characters relating fragmentary scenes of incidents in their lives, scenes which are accompanied by commentary, quarrels, dialogue, and interaction among the characters and between the characters and the actors. A kind of theatrical hall of mirrors, the actors who view these characters become, in effect, an audience. The actors are also, however, the actors who will be called upon to play the parts of the six characters in the dramatic text which is being created in their presence. For these actors and these characters, the stage becomes more real than the world.

"Six Characters in Search of an Author" is a remarkable work of imagination, both in its structure and its dialogue. It is comic and absurd, tragic and ponderous. The play is a work of original genius; the text (like its characters) is open to multiple interpretations and meanings. As one character says, in an appropriate Pirandellian bit of dialogue: "[t]herein lies the drama . . . in my awareness that each of us thinks of himself as one but that, well, it's not true, each of us is many, oh so many, according to the possibilities that are in us."

Not-Hard stories that anyone of just about any mental capacity can read and understand, I liked it for that. Great stories, stories pretty much based on the most common tales of humanity and society, but with an interesting twist. I rated it a 4 primarily for what it offers to a lot of people, the opportunity to read well written novelettes, and because its not quite a 5 (its no Les Miserables or War and Peace) but still enjoyable!

This tiny booklet of short stories offers wonderful vignettes of 19th century life in Sicily. The characters come alive and some of the stories remind me of my late grandparents' tales about villagers in the "old country". Especially nice booklet for people of Sicilian descent.

This book is very sad...it tells the story of a man who can't cope whit life's responsibilities and whit himself. A strange accident causes him to be believed dead, and he thinks he can assume a new identitiy and take on a new life. But he can't escape himself, and his new life shall be as unsatisfying and full of disillusions as the first. The clou of the book is the tragic melancholy of the seance...when he himself is evoked as his own spirit.Existentially spooky!

I would definetely recommend this novel. I enjoyed it very much. It helped me to come in contact with my innerself, and it made me think of things that i had never given any thought to before.

Italian author, winner of the Novel Prize in 1934, Luigi Pirandello is better known for his plays, forerunners of the theatre of the absurd. In this novel, the main character Mattia Pascal faces an economic downfall and a marriage without love. He decides to escape from this situation and in a stroke of luck wins a fortune in Monte Carlo. He takes a new identity, gains total freedom, shams death but the ghosts of his past existence, and the discovery of true love will spoil his new life.
The plot is neatly constructed and the dialogues between Mattia Pascal and some of the characters are enlightening, expressing Pirandello's philosophical outlook on life as well as reflecting biographical elements. The author is concerned with the ambiguity of truth and reality, the problem of identity and illusion. For him self-identity only exists in relation to others, as much as man is a social creature, unfortunately bound to social conventions. Man creates his own reality and lives in a world of illusions, always bound one way or the other to the past. The resulting paradox is that illusion may often become more real than reality!
Mattia Pascal is unable to cope with his total freedom which strucks him as being shapeless and aimless. Only the love he feels for Adriana will help him brake away from his suffocating mask. Upon returning to his former town he finds his wife has remarried and he is destined to become the shadow of a dead man.
Pirandello held a pessimistic outlook on life, believeing that his time was one of distress and darkeness (early 20th century), democracy was nothing more than tyranny disguised as freedom, and philosophical speculations nothing more than a product of our imagination.
"When death comes perpetual night will great us after the misty daylight of our illusion, or rather, we will be left to the mercy of Being, which will only have shattered the vain forms of our reasoning."