Pirandello
'Pirandello. By Dr. Walter Starkie. (Dent. 7s. 6d.) students of Italian literature and of the drama in general be grateful to Dr. Starkie for his interesting volume irandello, the first systematic and complete survey of work published in English. After a brief sketch of the n Futurist movement and of the Grotesques in the tre, whence Pirandello derived a part of his inspiration, Starkie gives a detailed account of the various phases randello's literary activities—Pirandello the Sicilian rtieularly important element), Pirandello the novelist short story writer, Pirandello the dramatist. Although m this last character that he is best known, his novels, more particularly his short stories, of which he has an enormous number, are a necessary introduction plays.
ello took to the drama comparatively late in life, Play, Se non cosi, having been produced when he nearly fifty years of age. He had,. indeed, previously a special antipathy for the stage. But it is as a play- t that he has achieved his greatest success. Starkie carefully analyses the whole of -Pirandello's and attempts to present a reasoned account of his 'Cal philosophy,. by no means an easy task in dealing an author so irrational and apparently illogical, ello's originality, according to Dr. Starkie, consists. that " whereas former dramatists constructed their with the comfortable assurance that their characters' would always remain subject to the logic of the. world, ello destroys. this human logic in his attempt to reach realitY-" Pirandello has indeed sounded the death- of the old traditional drama, but if all writers have a symbol summing up their genius, that of Pirandello, as Dr. Starkie says, is a huge _question mark. Particularly Henry 1V. . and Six Personages in. Search of an Author, Pirandello's best known and most successful plays, mark a date in the history of the Italian drama and " have turned the theatre as we . know it inside out." Dr. Starkie has certainly understood Pirandello as few other critics, even in Italy, have done. and in reading his book we see the gradual unravelling of the complicated play of criss-cross ideas and weird abnormal characters, and their development into a real philosophy of life based on the contrast between many forms of reality and of truth which does not exist in the Pirandellian scheme of things in itself, but " is the representation that each of us makes of it."
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