This Non-Stop Age

PIRANDELLO would say that my inability to enjoy shoot is my own fault. Caught up in the treadmill of modern life, I have no time to read his novel leisurely as it should be read.

Shoot, the operator of a moving picture camera, whose business is merely to turn the handle and observe, becomes almost as impersonal as his machine. As it registers sham, he registers life. The difference is that he comments; he comments endlessly. Marcel Proust alone could analyse motives and emotions more exhaustively. And I am afraid that only a person who really enjoys Proust, or who has read ""Ulysses"" from cover to cover will be able to wade through Pirandello's novel.

The complexities of Pirandello's thought are rendered more intricate by the translation. In a probable effort to reproduce the style of his original Mr. Moncrieff has produced an English titled, awkward and difficult, without much excuse for being so. The following is an example, picked absolutely at random; worse could be found:

"He speaks of a betrayal. Of his betrayal by Mirelli, who killed himself because of the proof that he wished to give him that it was easy to obtain from you (if you will pardon my saying so) what Mirelli himself had failed to attain."

or:

"The reason perhaps, must be sought in the harm that men had done to her from her childhood, in the vices by which she had been ruined in her early, vagrant life, and which in her own conception of them had so outraged her heart that she no longer felt it to deserve that a young man should with his love rescue and ennoble it."

There are some paragraphs in "Shoot" from which this reviewer could extract no meaning even after the most careful attention.

But that may be his lack, for in what he could understand he was struck by elements of really great drama and penetrating insight. The difficulties of language are as smoke surrounding a flame. Pirandello's thought, tinged with a profound yet tender pessimism, is in the truly grand manner. If he fails, it is only because he has attempted too much. And again his failure may be those of the translator and reviewer.