One, None, and a Hundred Grand - by Luigi Pirandello (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A hilarious exploration of the relativism of identity from Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This uproarious new translation of One, None, and a Hundred Grand delivers the defining work of Italian existentialism to an English speaking audience--in all its madcap glory. The novel's hero is a wealthy twenty-four-year-old naïf who considers himself "a regular guy," despite being cursed at birth with a surname that's "ugly to the point of cruelty: Maggot. Destined to become a fly, with its sour, spiteful, annoying drone." The story tracks Maggot's reaction to an offhand act of matrimonial malice. Was he aware that his nose leans to the right? He is struck by the full force of the fact that he does not, and cannot, know how others see him. So he sets out on a quest "to coax forth the many Maggots living inside my closest companions, and destroy them one by one." It's a premise, played straight, that acts as an inspired metaphor for the rightward-leaning madness of the 20th century, and a catalyst for a series of absurd scenarios and comic set pieces on par with the very best of 21st century observational comedy--imagine Curb Your Enthusiasm in fascist Sicily. Pirandello splits the atom of the self and detonates a tiny moment into "a catastrophe that supervened the very machinery of the cosmos." Perception and identity are leveled in a literary performance the Nobel laureate regarded as a "complete synthesis of everything I have done and the wellspring of what I will go on to do."

Review Quotes

"Pirandello marshals dizzying material with a masterful hand, providing clarity no matter how far his narrator stumbles in the dark . . . Those with a taste for philosophical fiction ought to snatch this up." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Pirandello's novel is among the world's quintessential novels on the question of identity. Wilsey's stunning translation captures its antic energy and its anguish. Fresh, fast, and very funny, it is immensely readable from start to finish. A translation as original and bracing as Pirandello's pages." --Jhumpa Lahiri

"The quality of One, No One and One Hundred Thousand as a philosophical novel through and through is striking from the first page to the last . . . marvelously thought-provoking."--Edith LaGraziana

"Pirandello's (1867-1936) 1926 novel . . . synthesizes the themes and personalities that illuminate such dramas as Six Characters in Search of an Author. Vitangelo Moscarda "loses his reality" when his wife cavalierly informs him that his nose tilts to the right; suddenly he realizes that . . . his identity is evanescent, based purely on the shifting perceptions of those around him. Thus he is simultaneously without a self--'no one'--and the theater for myriad selves--'one hundred thousand.' In a crazed search for an identity independent of others' preconceptions, Moscarda careens from one disaster to the next and finds his freedom even as he is declared insane. It is Pirandello's genius that a discussion of the fundamental human inability to communicate, of our essential solitariness, and of the inescapable restriction of our free will elicits such thoroughly sustained and earthy laughter."--Publishers Weekly

"In 1924, he wrote the novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, his strongest statement on systematic mutual incomprehension and the desire to subtract oneself from other people's controlling narratives."--Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books

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

"To this day, much of his voluminous oeuvre remains untranslated into English or, if translated, out of print. This is a shame. His prose . . . brims with sympathetic, contemporary-seeming characters, some struggling to live true and maintain their dignity in straitened circumstances such as those now befalling so many in the West today . . . If all this doesn't make Pirandello relevant to us now, then what would?"--Jeffrey Tayler, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Pirandello was interested in all forms of artistic representation. Characters, stories, episodes and even extracts of his writing move around from one medium to another in an ongoing process of cross-fertilization .... There is something strikingly modern about Pirandello's self-reflexivity, by turns in and out of the individual's control, which speaks to our times of endless self-making and remaking and to the countless, sometimes conflicting, versions of ourselves we project for others to see. Ours is an era of 'For myself, I am whoever you think I am' taken to the extreme .... Surely now is the moment to commission more fresh translations to mark Pirandello's contribution as novelist as well as dramatist - to do justice to his great contribution to global literature and to revive the work of mutation and cross-fertilization that fuelled it."--Ann Hallamore Caesar, The Times Literary Supplement

"Pirandello paints, but without the Romanticists' sentimental excitement, the cold fury of the cinema actors against the mechanics of their art which steals away their living audience . . . Pirandello forces on us the most bizarre situations without sacrificing the sense of reality one gets from a contemporary milieu."--F. Stringfellow Barr, Virginia Quarterly Review

"A revelation, a jolly existentialist nightmare, a comic freakout of the highest order. Pirandello knew what fools we are to believe in our individual, immutable identities, and through the travails of a certain Signor Maggot, he depicted with exacting zest the cost of that knowledge. Sean Wilsey's sharp translation delivers Pirandello's scary, hilarious delights with a remarkable touch." --Sam Lipsyte

About the Author

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was a prolific Italian writer most famous for his plays, which inspired the absurdist théâtre de l'absurde movement. An influence on writers and thinkers from Samuel Beckett to Jean-Paul Sartre, Pirandello won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for his contributions to European modernism. His metatheatrical play Six Characters in Search of an Author remains a cultural touchstone for contemporary playwrights.

Sean Wilsey is the author of a memoir, Oh the Glory of It All, an essay collection, More Curious, and, in collaboration with the actress Molly Shannon, the bestselling memoir Hello, Molly! His documentary film about 9/11, IX XI, is forthcoming in 2026.