The quality of One, No One and One Hundred Thousand as a philosophical novel through and through is striking from the first page to the last . . . marvelously thought-provoking.
—Edith LaGraziana
Pirandello’s (1867-1936) 1926 novel . . . synthesizes the themes and personalities that illuminate such dramas as Six Characters in Search of an Author. Vitangelo Moscarda "loses his reality" when his wife cavalierly informs him that his nose tilts to the right; suddenly he realizes that . . . his identity is evanescent, based purely on the shifting perceptions of those around him. Thus he is simultaneously without a self—'no one’—and the theater for myriad selves—'one hundred thousand.’ In a crazed search for an identity independent of others' preconceptions, Moscarda careens from one disaster to the next and finds his freedom even as he is declared insane. It is Pirandello's genius that a discussion of the fundamental human inability to communicate, of our essential solitariness, and of the inescapable restriction of our free will elicits such thoroughly sustained and earthy laughter.
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Publishers Weekly
In 1924, he wrote the novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, his strongest statement on systematic mutual incomprehension and the desire to subtract oneself from other people’s controlling narratives.
—Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books
Three writers of the twentieth century have given voice to—and leant their names to—our disquiet, our injuries, and our fear; at the same time, through the catharsis or measure of contemplation, which are among the revelations of art, they have helped us to live by tempering our anxiety and desperation; and I am using this term, tempering, in a musical sense...of striking a more pure, more crystalline, more vibrant note. These three writers are Pirandello, Kafka, and Borges.
—Leonardo Sciascia
To this day, much of his voluminous oeuvre remains untranslated into English or, if translated, out of print. This is a shame. His prose . . . brims with sympathetic, contemporary-seeming characters, some struggling to live true and maintain their dignity in straitened circumstances such as those now befalling so many in the West today . . . If all this doesn’t make Pirandello relevant to us now, then what would?
—Jeffrey Tayler, Los Angeles Review of Books
Pirandello was interested in all forms of artistic representation. Characters, stories, episodes and even extracts of his writing move around from one medium to another in an ongoing process of cross-fertilization …. There is something strikingly modern about Pirandello’s self-reflexivity, by turns in and out of the individual’s control, which speaks to our times of endless self-making and remaking and to the countless, sometimes conflicting, versions of ourselves we project for others to see. Ours is an era of 'For myself, I am whoever you think I am' taken to the extreme …. Surely now is the moment to commission more fresh translations to mark Pirandello’s contribution as novelist as well as dramatist – to do justice to his great contribution to global literature and to revive the work of mutation and cross-fertilization that fuelled it.
—Ann Hallamore Caesar, The Times Literary Supplement
Pirandello paints, but without the Romanticists' sentimental excitement, the cold fury of the cinema actors against the mechanics of their art which steals away their living audience . . . Pirandello forces on us the most bizarre situations without sacrificing the sense of reality one gets from a contemporary milieu.
—F. Stringfellow Barr, Virginia Quarterly Review
