Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio     by Luigi Pirandello, Translated by CK Scott-Montcrieff Original title: Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio Original language: Italian Published by Dedalus Pub. Date: June 6, 1990 Pub. Place: 1990 Format: Paperback, 356 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.56 x 7.76 x 4.96 ISBN: 0946626588 List Price: $11.95, £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.95

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Written in the first person, the novel takes the form of the diary of an imperturbable film camera-man who has the job of fixing deceiving images of a life which, in reality, changes from moment to moment. Seration has an almost sacred devotion to his work and isn’t distracted even when he finds himself filming a scene in which imitation becomes reality as an actor kills an actress out of jealousy as she acts alongside him. The resulting trauma turns him mute and shuts him inside a silence from which even a woman’s love can’t free him. He has, in effect, become a prisoner of the silent monologue which he captures with his movie camera, unchangeable, excluded from the constant flux of life.


The novel is unique in Pirandello’s oeuvre because of the story’s location. The world of the cinema is here the symbol of a society in disintegration, subjected to the rule of the utilitarian and empty of all human values; a society in which the machine is beginning to take man over, replacing his needs and feelings with the impersonal precision of technique. This is the process that is really engulfing Seration and reducing him to silence.

‘I am here. I serve my machine, in so far as I turn the handle so that it may eat. But my soul does not serve me. My hand serves me, that is to say serves the machine. The human soul for food, life for food, you must supply gentlemen, to the machine whose handle I turn.... Already my eyes and ears too, from force of habit are beginning to see and hear everything in the guise of this rapid, quivering, ticking mechanical reproduction.’p10