Jim Fonseca's review of The Late Mattia Pascal
4/5: Right in the first few pages the author tells us this is the story of a man who “died twice." Our hero, or anti-hero, is going nowhere in late 1800’s Italy. He earns a pittance as the librarian in backwater Italian town. He lives with screaming kids, a wife who has lost interest in him and a viscous mother-in-law who hates him. One day while out of town, he learns from newspapers that the decomposed body of a suicide victim down by the watermill in his home town was mistaken for him. He is free! He goes on a gambling spree and actually makes money and creates a new life for himself in a di...
29 Mar 2014 ... The book was published in 1904, and like other novels of that era, such as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment or Unamuno's Abel Sanchez, ...