Tales of Madness, by Luigi Pirandello, ISBN 9780937832844, $9.99

Nobel Prize Winner Luigi Pirandello set out to write one short story per day for one whole year. Death kept him from fulfilling that goal; nevertheless, he came close to achieving it. Although there are several themes in the collection, the one on madness and the one on suicide seem to stand out. The late Giovanni Bussino, who had planned to translate all of Pirandello’s stories into English, himself died before he could fulfill that goal.
Luigi Pirandello became famous as an author of drama; his innovative techniques, however, and his delving into the psychology of his characters, brought him world acclaim. The same drama is played out in each character presented in this volume, especially in, When I Was Crazy, A Horse in the Moon, and, The Reality of the Dream. In many ways, their lives’ situations become similar to those of our own. Like Pirandello’s characters, very often we find ourselves enclosed in jars that we build around ourselves only to realize that we have to break that jar in order to gain freedom. The problem is: freedom from what? From the monsters we’ve created for ourselves, or from those created for us!

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