Mattia Pascal grew up in a small Italian town not dissimilar to that of the author's upbringing. Pascal leads a somewhat feckless boyhood, allowing opportunities to slip away from him and living on the accumulated but dwindling resources of his family. As a young man he finds himself duped into poverty and an unhappy marriage made sadder by grief. He escapes on an adventure at Monte Carlo where he submits himself to Fortune which provides him with an extraordinary erasure of his old identity and the funds to maintain a new one. With the passage of a couple of years however he becomes horribly disillusioned with his situation and the isolation it brings. In a dramatic act he reassumes his old persona and returns to his home town, only to find himself written out of the script of his own life. In this novel Pirandello explores, as in his other works, themes of identity and reality, laced with plenty of wit and irony. (Peter Tucker)

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