Late Mattia Pascal

Mattia Pascal grew up in a small Italian town not dissimilar to that of the author's upbringing. Pascal leads a somewhat feckless boyhood, allowing opportunities to slip away from him and living on the accumulated but dwindling resources of his family. As a young man he finds himself duped into poverty and an unhappy marriage made sadder by grief. He escapes on an adventure at Monte Carlo where he submits himself to Fortune which provides him with an extraordinary erasure of his old identity and