Luigi Pirandello (1867 – 1936)
Translated by Arthur Livingston (1883 – 1944)
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)
Genre(s): Fictional Biographies & Memoirs, Published 1900 onward
Little Enrico Bottini is a ten year-old third grade student in Italy who keeps a diary for one whole school year. It records the general problems, excitements, and successes any third grader might deal with, all explained from Enrico’s point of view. Through the course of this one year, we watch Enrico learn and grow a little, and hopefully we can learn from his experiences, too.
Edmondo de Amici’s 1886 book Cuore was an immediate huge success when it was published, and while school rooms have changed dramatically in the century and a half since the book was first published within Italy and elsewhere, the attraction of this book has hardly diminished, and it is still immensely popular. – Summary by Carolin
Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood (1851 – 1928)