Novelle per un Anno, vol. 10: Il Vecchio Dio

In this tenth volume of Pirandello's monumental short story cycle, the author turns his unflinching gaze on what remains when the old certainties crumble. The stories here trace the fractures in Italian society at the turn of the century: faith grown mechanical, love turned to habit, identity dissolved into performance. Yet Pirandello is no mere nostalgist for a lost 'old God', he probes what replaces that divine order and finds something stranger and more troubling: a world where meaning must be constructed rather than received, where every truth reveals itself as merely one perspective among infinite others. The title story offers perhaps his most devastating portrait of this spiritual crisis: a man who discovers that his lifelong devotion has been built on a silence that might be emptiness, or might be something worse. These are stories that unsettle because they hold a mirror to the reader's own comfortable illusions.