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One, No One and One Hundred Thousand is, in my opinion, the most badass novel by the greatest Italian writer of the 20th century: Luigi Pirandello.
This book, when I first read it at 19, struck me. I didn't understand why, often, in interpersonal relationships with anyone, from mom to the milkman, things never added up. Not that they add up for me now, but at least by reading this super-masterpiece, I more or less know why.
Pirandello explained relativity to me better than Einstein.
Everything is relative, even people, opinions, the personality of an individual, even what you THINK you are because When one lives, one lives and does not see oneself. Knowing oneself is dying.
Saint Augustine said: "The only truth is that there are no truths"... or something like that... but the sense is that.
And so, Vitangelo Moscarda, the protagonist, a 40-year-old of no particular distinction, who leads a rather comfortable life having inherited a bank from his father, starts having just a bit of an existential crisis just because one day his wife points out that he has a slightly crooked nose.
Wives? Made precisely to discover the husband's flaws.
So, little by little, just as happened to me as I read, a world opens up to Vitangelo, and he doesn't take it at all well, he goes into crisis.
He walks and observes his slightly crooked nose in a shop window. He starts to put two and two together. Just as his wife saw him as slightly different in physical appearance, after all, it's just a slight crookedness of his nose, could it be that others also see him differently and not just for his physical appearance? Maybe everyone sees him in their own way? And he will discover that's exactly how it is. But then, who am I? Am I not ONE? Am I thus ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND? But then I guess I am NO ONE. Consider that for exactly the same reasons many years ago a friend of mine disappeared. He didn't die, but he broke ties with all of us just because they called him IRU (it's a nickname like any other but it derived from a twist of his last name, and we used to call him that back in high school, but by the time he ditched us he was over 30! Imagine how this bullshit of being IRU grew in his brain over the years until one day he said: I am not Iru, I am Dario!).
Forgive the digression, but I'm almost done anyway.
Pirandello's last novel is a punch in the stomach. Bitter, relentless, magnificent. We witness our protagonist's progressive disintegration of identity and mental sanity without being able to do anything. It makes you want to shout Hey! But Vitangelo is right! Listen to him! He's not going crazy, it's just that... But there's nothing to be done, it really seems like he's losing his mind, and not just a little.
Read it, but not casually. Read it with the utmost attention and concentration. Besides, it's beautifully written, Luigi knew how to piece words together.
Buy it, it should not be missing from your library. It's as beautiful as Crime and Punishment, I mean it.
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