Reading Pirandello in Simple Italian: Il fu Mattia Pascal at B1

The premise, which has not aged a day

Mattia Pascal is a small-town librarian with a marriage he cannot stand and a job he does not do. He runs away, wins a fortune at Monte Carlo, and on the train home reads in the newspaper that a body has been identified as his own.

So he is free. Nobody is looking for him. He can be anyone. The rest of the novel, published in 1904, is about discovering that a man without documents, without a past and without anyone who can confirm he exists is not free at all.

Why he suits learners better than most classics

Pirandello was Sicilian, trained as a philologist in Bonn, and wrote in a deliberately plain Italian. His sentences are short. His vocabulary is ordinary. The difficulty in Pirandello is never the language: it is that you finish a chapter and are not sure what just happened to the narrator’s sense of self.

That makes him unusually well suited to B1. You can follow the words while the ideas do the work.

What to read after

• Uno, nessuno e centomila: the same question taken to its end.
• Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore: the play that broke European theatre in 1921.
• Novelle per un anno: short stories, and the easiest entry point of all.

The graded edition of Il fu Mattia Pascal sits at B1: twenty chapters, footnotes on the page, glossary and comprehension questions. See the rest of level B1.