Italo Svevo

A newly translated collection of fiction by the influential Italian modernist, continuing on his landmark work Zeno's Conscience. A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno's Conscience in 1923. Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start--aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamilias--even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of Italian fascism also cast a shadow over the book's pages. It opens with "The Contract," in which Zeno's manager, the hardheaded young Olivi, expresses, like the war veterans who were Mussolini's early followers, a sense of entitlement born of fighting in the trenches. Zeno, by contrast, embodies the confusion and paralysis of the more decorous, although sleepy, way of life associated with the onetime Austro-Hungarian Empire which for so long ruled over Trieste but has now been swept away. As always, Svevo is attracted to the theme of how people fail to fit in. It is they, he suggests, who offer a recognizably human countenance in a world ravaged by the ambitions and fantasies of its true believers.

Known for inspiring James Joyce's Leopold Bloom from Ulysses, Zeno Cosini is the bumbling yet charming alter ego of Italo Svevo, who here lays bare a hilarious litany of neuroticisms about his health, friendships, family and women. Having submitted himself to Freudian psychoanalysis, the narrator keeps a diary with the aim of conquering his addiction to smoking. He describes his marriage to the woman he didn't want to marry, how he drives his business partner to despair, and how his 'last cigarette' turns out to be one of many. Zeno is the classic 'schlemiel'; his erratic foibles, his questionable logic and his curious inclination to self sabotage help shine a light on human behaviour in general, and reveal the many subtle half-truths people may tell themselves in order to defend their own actions and egos.

A marvel of psychological insight from one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth centuryWhen vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno Cosini seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno's account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, Svevo's devilishly funny portrayal of a man's attempt to give up smoking and make sense of his life has become a cult classic.

Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing littérateur Mario Samigli: he dupes him into thinking that a representative of a prestigious Viennese publishing house wants to commission a German translation of a long-forgotten novel Samigli had written and published at his own expense forty years ago. This leads the old man to reach new heights of self-delusion, spurred on by Gaia’s succession of ruses. In this tragicomic study of deception and disappointment, Italo Svevo – who himself was an undiscovered writer until his old age – parodies elements of his own life and offers an insightful psychological portrait of a person who has lost touch with reality.

A playful account of one man's life in early twentieth century Trieste

Zeno Cosini, il protagonista dell'opera, proviene da una famiglia ricca e vive nell'ozio ed in un rapporto conflittuale con il padre, che si rifletter su tutta la sua vita. Nell'amore, nei rapporti coi familiari e gli amici, nel lavoro, egli prova un costante senso di inadeguatezza e di "inettitudine", che interpreta come sintomi di una malattia. In realt solo pi tardi scoprir che non lui a essere malato, ma la societ in cui vive.

Zeno Cosini, il protagonista dell'opera, proviene da una famiglia ricca e vive nell'ozio ed in un rapporto conflittuale con il padre, che si rifletter su tutta la sua vita. Nell'amore, nei rapporti coi familiari e gli amici, nel lavoro, egli prova un costante senso di inadeguatezza e di "inettitudine", che interpreta come sintomi di una malattia. In realt solo pi tardi scoprir che non lui a essere malato, ma la societ in cui vive.

Impeto e follia inducono Giorgio, un facchino fannullone, a uccidere un amico per denaro. Improvvisamente e senza una spiegazione ci troviamo sul luogo di un delitto terrificante e inaspettato. Ma non solo, siamo nei panni stessi del protagonista, nei suoi vani tentativi di zittire la coscienza, nel goffo progetto di cambiare cappello per sfuggire alla propria ombra. Siamo quindi allo stesso tempo correi e giudici dell'efferatezza del gesto e delle sue nefaste conseguenze.

Alfonso Nitti, giovane intellettuale con aspirazioni letterarie, lascia il paese natale, dove vive con la madre, e si trasferisce a Trieste, trovando un avvilente impiego come bancario.

Dunque uccidere era cosa tanto facile? Si ferm per un solo istante nella sua corsa e guard dietro a s nella lunga via rischiarata da pochi fanali vide giacere a terra il corpo di quell'Antonio di cui egli neppure conosceva il .

Mamma mia, Iersera, appena, ricevetti la tua buona e bella lettera.