In the Library
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Luigi Pirandello, 1921
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Edward Storer (1922)
- Original
- Original it
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 18k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
A theatre company is slogging through a dull rehearsal when six strangers appear at the back of the house and walk down the aisle, asking to be staged. They are not actors. They are a family, unfinished, abandoned by the writer who dreamed them up and then put down his pen, and they have come to act out the scene that made them: the afternoon a Father, in a house of ill repute, reached for a girl he failed to recognise as his own Stepdaughter. Luigi Pirandello's argument is quietly terrifying. A character is realer than the actor who plays them, he insists, because a character is locked forever in the single moment that defines them, while the actor goes home and becomes someone else by supper. The Manager tries to mount the story; the characters keep interrupting to say the performance is a well-meaning lie. By the end a shot has been fired, and no one, onstage or in the seats, can tell whether the death was real or only beautifully rehearsed.