The Late Mattia Pascal

The Late Mattia Pascal (Italian: Il fu Mattia Pascal ) is a 1904 novel by Luigi Pirandello. It is one of his best-known works and was his first major treatment of the paradox "form/life." The narrator-protagonist is a young Italian man who, after his father's death, sees his family ruined by a mean swindler, the man who was supposed to help them. Mattia finds himself in a miserable social condition. He feels that his promising youth has vanished into a dreary dead-end job and a unhappy marriage: his wife doesn't love him, his mother-in-law, with whom he lives, hates him. So Mattia leaves to MonteCarlo, where he wins a lot of money in a casino. On the train back, after 12 days, he learns on reading a newspaper that, in his villages, everybody thinks he is dead : an unrecognizable body has been found in his well. Incredible! He has a second chance to begin a new life. But it's not easy to get it done. He escapes from his "form", his "shape" a sort of social identity that reveals to be a cage, and tries to begin a new life without any social identity, but .. ..