Italo Svevo
Personal Information
Description
Aron Ettore Schmitz (December 19, 1861 – September 13, 1928), better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian businessman and author of novels, plays, and short stories. Born in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary) to a Jewish family, Italo Svevo (literally swabian Italian) wrote the classic novel La Coscienza di Zeno (rendered as Confessions of Zeno, or Zeno's Conscience) and self-published it in 1923. The work, showing the author's interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, is written in the form of the memoirs of one Zeno Cosini, who writes them at the insistence of his psychoanalyst. Schmitz's psychoanalyst was Ottocaro Weiss, who had been trained by Freud in Vienna. Schmitz's novel received almost no attention from Italian readers and critics at the time. The work might have disappeared altogether if it were not for the efforts of James Joyce. Joyce had met Schmitz in 1907, when Joyce tutored him in English while working for Berlitz in Trieste. Joyce read Schmitz's earlier novel Senilità, which had also been largely ignored when published in 1898. Joyce championed Confessions of Zeno, helping to have it translated into French and then published in Paris, where critics praised it extravagantly. That led Italian critics, including Eugenio Montale, to discover it. Zeno Cosini, the book's hero, mirrored Schmitz, being a businessman fascinated by Freudian theory. Schmitz was also a model for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce's Ulysses. Schmitz was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. He spoke Italian as a second language (as he usually spoke the Triestine dialect, similar to Venetian) and, according to some critics, wrote it badly - though some have pointed out that it is not bad Italian, but rather the official Tuscan dialect in a Triestino mouth. Confessions of Zeno never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which rarely left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Schmitz brings a keenly sardonic wit to his observations of Trieste and, in particular, to his hero, an indifferent man who cheats on his wife and lies to his psychoanalyst and who is trying to explain himself to his psychoanalyst by revisiting his memories. There is a final connection between Schmitz-Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought psychoanalysis, he said, in order to discover why he was addicted to nicotine. As he reveals in his memoirs, each time he had given up smoking, with the iron resolve that this would be the "ultima sigaretta!!", he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. That feeling was, however, so strong that he found smoking irresistible, if only so that he could stop smoking again in order to experience that thrill once more. Svevo likewise smoked for all of his life. After being hit by a car while crossing the street, he was brought into hospital at Motta di Livenza, where his health rapidly failed. As death approached he asked one of his visitors for a cigarette, telling everyone that this really would be the last one (the request was denied). Svevo lived for part of his life in Charlton, south-east London, while working for a family firm. He documented this period in his letters to his wife which highlighted the cultural differences he encountered in Edwardian England. His old home at 67 Charlton Church Lane now carries a blue plaque.
Books
Emilio's Carnival
"In Senilita, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at thirty-five, and Angiolina, a seductively beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self-torment, the novel traces the intoxicating effect of a narcissistic and amoral woman on an indecisive daydreamer who vacillates between guilt and moral smugness."--BOOK JACKET.
Confession of Zeno
Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo's charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and endlessly self-deluding mind. The mind in question belongs to Zeno Cosini, a neurotic Italian businessman who is writing his confessions at the behest of his psychiatrist. Here are Zeno's interminable attempts to quit smoking, his courtship of the beautiful yet unresponsive Ada, his unexpected -- and unexpectedly happy -- marriage to Ada's homely sister Augusta, and his affair with a shrill-voiced aspiring singer. -- Text refers to other edition.
Senilità
Not so long ago Emilio Brentani was a promising young author. Now he is an insurance agent on the fast track to forty. He gains a new lease on life, though, when he falls for the young and gorgeous Angiolina--except that his angel just happens to be an unapologetic cheat. But what begins as a comedy of infatuated misunderstanding ends in tragedy, as Emilio's jealous persistence in his folly--against his friends' and devoted sister's advice, and even his own best knowledge--leads to the loss of the one person whom, too late, he realizes he truly loves.
James Joyce
This is the first full biographyt of James Joyce since Richard Ellmann's scholarly work, published in 1959.
La Coscienza Di Zeno
Rimasto incompreso per lungo tempo, "La coscienza di Zeno" è il più importante romanzo di Svevo e uno dei capolavori della letteratura italiana contemporanea. È il resoconto di un viaggio nell'oscurità della psiche, nella quale si riflettono complessi e vizi della società borghese dei primi del Novecento, le sue ipocrisie, i suoi conformismi e insieme la sua nascosta, tortuosa, ambigua voglia di vivere. L'inettitudine ad aderire alla vita, l'eros come evasione e trasgressione, il confine incerto tra salute e malattia divengono i temi centrali su cui si interroga Zeno Cosini in queste pagine bellissime che segnarono l'inizio di un modo nuovo di intendere la narrativa. Primo romanzo "psicoanalitico" della nostra letteratura, quest'opera rivoluzionaria seppe interpretare magistralmente le ansie, i timori e gli interrogativi più profondi di una società in cambiamento.
As a man grows older
Not so long ago Emilio Brentani was a promising young author. Now he is an insurance agent on the fast track to forty. He gains a new lease on life, though, when he falls for the young and gorgeous Angiolina—except that his angel just happens to be an unapologetic cheat. But what begins as a comedy of infatuated misunderstanding ends in tragedy, as Emilio’s jealous persistence in his folly—against his friends’ and devoted sister’s advice, and even his own best knowledge—leads to the loss of the one person who, too late, he realizes he truly loves. In the novel, Svevo addresses the problems of ineptitude and of the inability on the part of the protagonist to manage his own inner, sentimental life. The indecisiveness and inaction with which Emilio deals with affairs in his life lead him to shut out his memories, leaving him in a state of spiritual old age (hence the title "Senility").