The Late Mathias Pascal

Summary

Mathias Pascal’s existence is a study in domestic ossification, a man strangled by the vitriolic confluence of a shrewish mother-in-law and the crushing monotony of a provincial library. When the dual tragedies of his mother’s and infant’s deaths sever his final tethers to sanity, a fortuitous windfall at the Monte Carlo tables offers a fiscal rebirth, only to be eclipsed by a metaphysical one: his own reported suicide. Embracing this spectral liberty, Pascal—reinvented as 'Adriano Meis'—wanders into a Roman phantasmagoria of fraudulent psychics and unrequited longing. He discovers, with agonizing clarity, that a man without a legal identity is merely a ghost incapable of either justice or love. The narrative culminates in a bitter, ironic return to a home where he is no longer required, forcing him to inhabit the periphery of his own life as a permanent outsider.

Synopsis

Mathias Pascal, only son of a once rich family, marries beautiful Romilde, who has a terrible mother-in-law. She controls her daughter, and soon his home life becomes a nightmare, as well as his job as assistant librarian in his home town. His only moments of lights are his mother and his baby, but both die on the same day. Shocked he leaves his hometown and gets to Monte Carlo, where he wins a fortune at the Casino. Returning home, he reads his own obituary in a paper. They have found a corpse in a creek and connected it with his disappearance. Mathias, noticing that he now is free from all ties to his old live, decides to start a new one, and goes to Rome, where he rents a room in a pension full of fake spiritualists who are controlling the owner. The chief of the gang, Terence, wants to marry the owner's daughter Adrienne, and has convinced her father to give her to him, with no regards of Adrienne's feelings, who is in love with and loved by Mathias. When Terence steals Mathias 50,000 Lira, and Mathias, being officially dead can neither marry Adrienne nor denounce Terence to the police, he decides to do something about his state and travels home, just to notice that Romalinda has remarried.