Luigi Pirandello: The Late Mattia Pascal

What a joy and what a mercy it is to be free.  To be free from the limits of interpretation, to not ask "What does it mean?", and to experience a book as an event, rather than as a coded message of some sort, how lovely and kind.

And yet, as the title character found in his adventures here, every freedom is a tyranny of its own.  Yes, he loosed himself from the bonds of family, duty, and obligation; he escaped from the prison of his life.  But this freedom closed off to him that which he really wanted: stability, connection, and especially love.  He set about painting a new picture of himself, and, "determined to begin  new life from this point, [he] was filled and uplifted by a fresh infantile happiness" (83). Nonetheless, he found himself staring at the unfinished, unfinishable portrait of himself and growling at it, much as Pepita did later in the book (201).

Reading this book on its own terms, in perhaps something approaching an Asian style, I found myself immersed in its world, and as often happens, let the book escape from itself and read me back, even reading the other books I was working through with me.  But what did it mean?  Why did I read it?  Am I missing something, perhaps hidden in Paleari's theories of light and darkness (114-16)? Is the life that I have reconstructed to escape my former life as hopelessly untethered to reality as that of Adriano Meis?