November read: "The Late Mattia Pascal" by Luigi Pirandello
Details
For November, and probably our last book club meeting of 2025, we will read "The Late Mattia Pascal" by Luigi Pirandello.
Obs.: Pirandello is in the public domain, but I couldn't find a free copy available. However, I could find e-books as cheap as 12 kr.
Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life—only to find that this new existence is as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he left behind, it's too late: his job is gone, his wife has remarried. Mattia Pascal's fate is to live on as the ghost of the man he once was.
An explorer of identity and its mysteries, a connoisseur of black humor, Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello is among the most teasing and profound of modern masters.