While living an oppressive, provincial existence, Mattia Pascal learns that he has been mistakenly declared dead. Blessed with that rarest of opportunities - the chance to start an entirely new life - he moves to a new city under an assumed name, only to find this new "free" existence unbearable. Faking his own suicide, he returns to his hometown, where his wife has remarried and his job has been filled. Reduced to a sad walk-on part in his own life, the only role now left to him is that of the "late Mattia Pascal."

Review

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 cristalline, more vibrant note. These three writers are Pirandello, Kafka, and Borges.
-- Leonardo Sciascia

Very funny, often hilariously so. It is also moving, disturbing, tragic. For Pirandello saw comedy residing in "the fundamental contradiction ... between human aspiration and frailty," a contradiction that induced "a certain perplexity between weeping and laughing."
-- The New York Times Book Review

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