One, No One and One Hundred Thousand
Written by Nobel Prize-winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand is a slim novel that politely taps you on the shoulder, then dismantles your entire sense of self. It begins with a throwaway comment: the narrator’s wife casually mentions that his nose is slightly crooked. From that tiny fracture, his reality shatters with spectacular drama, and what follows is less a story and more a spiralling, philosophical meltdown disguised as comedy.
This is my first Italian novel in translation, and it feels like eavesdropping on a slightly unhinged internal monologue. The narrative voice is intimate, rambling, and occasionally bordering on ranty, with sentences that stretch on as if they’ve missed the memo on full stops. At times, the prose feels dense, even a touch chaotic, but it’s exactly this stream-of-consciousness style that makes the novel’s exploration of identity so unnervingly personal. You don’t just read the book; you feel it poking around in the drawers of your own mind, pulling out things you didn’t remember leaving there.
“True solitude is to be found in a place that lives a life of its own, but which for you holds no familiar footprint, speaks in no known voice, and where accordingly the stranger is yourself.”
As someone already painfully aware of how different I seem in the mirror, on camera and in my own head, this book pressed several buttons I didn’t know were wired to alarms. I know one side of my face photographs better than the other; my reflection and my photos often look like distant cousins who barely speak. My voice, too, lives a double life: there’s the one I hear in my head and the one that plays back on recordings, making me want to file for witness protection. Watching myself on video calls is an extreme sport I only partake in under duress, and even then with one eye half-closed.
Pirandello takes that everyday discomfort and pushes it to the edge: what if everyone who meets you is creating their own customised version of you in their head? One you don’t control and probably wouldn’t recognise? The novel leans into this identity crisis with unnerving precision. I found myself thinking about all the “me”s walking around in other people’s memories—some kinder, some harsher, none entirely accurate. It’s both fascinating and mildly horrifying, like realising your Peter Pan shadow has a personality of its own and might not want to be sewn back on.
Reading One, No One and One Hundred Thousand today, in an era of curated online personas and relentless self-presentation, feels almost uncomfortably relevant. The novel quietly asks: if we are not who we believe ourselves to be to others, which version counts? And what happens when the gap between our self-image and others’ perception becomes too wide to politely ignore? There are no neat answers here, only the uneasy awareness that our carefully constructed selves are far less solid than we’d like to believe. For a short, sardonic Italian classic about a crooked nose, it leaves an impressively straight mark on the psyche.
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