Crossword-Solution: PIRANDELLO 10 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 13

CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE ix ON LIVING ABROAD 1 ZENITH 25 DISILLUSIONMENT 40 SOPHISTICATION 53 MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN 69 LEGEND 85 TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY 97 LUIGI PIRANDELLO 116 THE FRENCH 139 PORNOGRAPHY 152 SUCCESS 166 BLACK-AND-WHITE 180 ON LIVING ABROAD This is not an essay in defence of living abroad nor yet a plea to others to choose such a life.

Five of the twenty-four volumes have been published so far--closely printed books of some three hundred pages each; but I find in them little of the Pirandello who is an important figure in Italian literature to-day.

Now and again one does get a hint of the Pirandello of the plays--in the extraordinary, almost wasteful (and often wasted) power of characterization, for example, or in the preoccupation with death--but these things are obscured by the verbose pedestrian prose, quite without freshness.

Indeed, from all that I have read of Pirandello I am inclined to believe that it is only conversation, dramatic dialogue, that he can write well and freshly.

The last stories in this volume (the fifth) are the best, hint more clearly at the Pirandello of the plays, at both his virtues and his defects; so it is just possible that the entire collection is being made chronologically (though nothing is said of any such plan in the preface), in which case, to judge them fairly, one ought, I suppose, to await the publication of the other nineteen volumes.