Luigi Pirandello - The Excluded

In traditional Sicily a century ago, a married woman maintains an innocent correspondence with the most popular intellectual and politician of the city. Her husband discovers this and, accusing her of adultery, drives her from their home; her own father disowns her and, fearing public disgrace, locks himself in a room which he refuses to leave except feet first. She dedicates her new life to alleviating the suffering of her mother and sister, but the two men who caused all this suffering do not leave her a moment's peace. Between the sense of duty and social laws, between reason and passion, a woman struggles to survive.

"In the novel The Excluded, a geometric demonstration of a paradox, does not exhaust the fascination of this Pirandellian novel, a novel full of tension, populated with characters built with precision and cruelty in an already theatrical dimension and yet able to pause on luminous and serene nature descriptions or on landscapes of the heart in which the individual discovers his loneliness."

Luigi de Bellis