A Very Old Man
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Svevo's unfinished but bounteous sequel to his 1923 masterpiece, Zeno's Conscience, returns readers to the searching, self-deluding mind of Zeno Cosini of Trieste. Now in his 70s, having made a small fortune through war profiteering, he's still an inveterate smoker, still philandering, and still vexed by his colorful family. In the first of five short sketches, Zeno manages to squander his wealth in the aftermath of WWI and is locked out of his own company thanks in part to the machinations of his devious son-in-law, Valentino. He is no less baffled by his own son, the mediocre artist and sometimes communist Alfio; and his daughter Augustina, whose excessive shows of virtue become even more galling after Valentino's death. He at least has his grandson Umbertino to dote on and his sardonic nephew Carlo to play cards with. He also has Felicita, a working-class mistress. Throughout it all, Zeno remains, in his own words, "a man born in inopportune times," a diffident, comic embodiment of Modernism despite his repeated failure to comprehend the times, prone to maxims like "mother nature is maniacal; she has a mania for reproduction" and liable to romanticize his humble circumstances. Though essentially a coda to its classic precedent, there's plenty to chew on. These shorts offer a welcome last word from Svevo's immortal hero.
