Download or read book A Very Old Man written by Italo Svevo and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Italo Svevo the man and the Writer written by Philip Nicholas Furbank and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Confessions of Zeno written by Italo Svevo and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book As a Man Grows Older written by Italo Svevo and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memoir of Italo Svevo written by Livia Veneziani Svevo and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Italian Italo Svevo had many things in common with other writers: a long struggle for recognition, a mutually respectful friendship with a noteworthy author (in Svevo's case, James Joyce), and a long list of neuroses. Unlike some writers, however, Svevo was fortunate to have a wife who worked tirelessly on his behalf." "After Svevo's death in 1928 at the age of sixty-six, Livia Veneziani Svevo penned this portrait of a serious artist and a loving, if quirky, marriage. Memoir of Italo Svevo illuminates its subject's darkly comic novels and shows how a successful middle-aged businessman, as obsessed with smoking as with his abandoned literary ambitions, became one of the great authors of the twentieth century." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl written by Italo Svevo and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ...the sin of an old man is equal to about two sins of a young man. The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns--attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, and the cost of sexual desire. This novella is a marvel of psychological insight, following the man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications to their tragic-comic end. It is presented here in a translation first commissioned and published by Virginia Woolf for her Hogarth Press. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
Download or read book Zeno s Conscience written by Italo Svevo and published by CONVIVIVM. This book was released on 2015 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zeno's Conscience (La Conscienza di Zeno), by Italo Svevo, is a masterpiece of Italian literature of the 20th century. The book is narrated by Zeno Cosini, a middle-aged man who decides to write his memories in an attempt to understand himself and his life. Through his reflections, the author explores themes such as identity, psychoanalysis, death, illness, and love. The narrative is filled with humor and irony, but it is also deeply philosophical and introspective. Zeno is a complex and contradictory character whose actions are often motivated by selfish and thoughtless impulses. The author accurately describes the human mind, with its contradictions and weaknesses. Svevo is a master in creating memorable characters, such as the sisters Ada, whom he is in love with, and Augusta, and Guido, his rival in the conquest of Ada. Svevo's language is clear, innovative, and ironic. Zeno's Conscience is a work that challenges the reader to reflect on life and human nature, and continues to be one of the most important and influential works of Italian literature.
Download or read book A Life written by Italo Svevo and published by Pushkin Press. This book was released on 2006-11-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Life is the gruelling tale of the frustrated existence of a bank clerk with a poetic soul. The artistic aspirations of the protagonist and the emptiness of his daily life become tragic in the great divide between what he wants and what he actually has and gets. Alfonso the bank clerk wants to be a poet and seems to be falling in love with Annetta, the vain and arrogant daughter of his boss. But the emptiness of both his attempts at writing and at love lead to an ironic and painful conclusion.
Download or read book As a Man Grows Older written by Italo Svevo and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-27 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Marked by deep humanity and earthy humor, by psychological insight and an elegant simplicity of style, As a Man Grows Older (Senilità, in Italian; the English title was the suggestion of Svevo’s great friend and admirer, James Joyce) is a brilliant study of hopeless love and hapless indecision. It is a masterwork of Italian literature, here beautifully rendered into English in Beryl de Zoete’s classic translation.-Print ed. “The poem of our complex modern madness.”—EUGENIO MONTALE “Svevo has the capacity—so rare as to be almost unknown in the English novel—of handling emotional relationships with a combined tenderness, humour and realism.”—THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Download or read book James Joyce and Italo Svevo written by Stanley Price and published by Mitchell Beazley. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Joyce left Dublin in 1904, bound for Trieste and a job teaching English at the Berlitz School. He was to live there for the next eleven years. Italo Svevo, born and bred in Trieste, worked there for his family's marine paint company. He had also written two novels, published privately and unsuccessfully. In 1907, wanting to improve his English to do business with the British Admiralty, Svevo went to Berlitz, where Joyce became his teacher. Svevo was then 46 and Joyce 25. Despite their different backgrounds, Irish Catholic and Triestene Jewish, they had, intellectually, much in common. They admired each other's writing. Joyce improved Svevo's English. Svevo helped Joyce stay solvent, and also became the inspiration for Leopold Bloom. In Ulysses, the near father-son relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Bloom in Dublin was very close to that of Svevo and Joyce in Trieste. The two writers lived through the great political and cultural upheavals of the early 20th century, and their story has a fascinating supporting cast - W.B. Yeats and G.B. Shaw, Proust and Hemingway, Freud and Jung, H.G. Wells and T.S. Eliot. Although often living in different cities - Zurich, Paris, London - their friendship survived. When Ulysses was finally published in Paris in 1922, its success enabled Joyce to help Svevo find a publisher for his great comic masterpiece The Confessions of Zeno. European literature owes a great deal to that meeting in Trieste.
Download or read book Further Confessions of Zeno written by Italo Svevo and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 5 short stories and a play dealing with old age - its frustrations and consolations.
Download or read book Nicotine written by Gregor Hens and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST By turns philosophical and darkly comic, an ex-smoker’s meditation on the nature and consequences of his nearly lifelong addiction. Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a lifelong addiction, from the thrill of the first drag to the perennial last last cigarette. Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behavior. He extends the conversation with other smokers to meditations on Mark Twain and Italo Svevo, the nature of habit, and the validity of hypnosis. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of dependency, offering a brilliant analysis of the psychopathology of addiction. This is a book about the physical, emotional, and psychological power of nicotine as not only an addictive drug, but also a gateway to memory, a long trail of streetlights in the rearview mirror of a smoker’s life. Cigarettes are sometimes a solace, sometimes a weakness, but always a witness and companion. This is a meditation, an ode, and a eulogy, one that will be passed hand-to-hand between close friends.
Download or read book The Lamentations of Zeno written by Ilija Trojanow and published by Verso. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist. Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career. Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world. The Lamentations of Zeno is an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer. Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative. It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age--perhaps of our entire history as a species--from an impassioned human angle.
Download or read book The Lies that Bind Rethinking Identity written by Kwame Anthony Appiah and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year As seen on the Netflix series Explained From the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarized world are riddled with contradiction. Who do you think you are? That’s a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn’t primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation—of self-rule—is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage. From Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who miraculously became an eminent European philosopher before retiring back to Africa, to Italo Svevo, the literary marvel who changed citizenship without leaving home, to Appiah’s own father, Joseph, an anticolonial firebrand who was ready to give his life for a nation that did not yet exist, Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with vibrant narratives to expose the myths behind our collective identities. These “mistaken identities,” Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities—from chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities aren’t something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns. Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about who—and what—“we” are.
Download or read book In the Shadow of the Mammoth written by Giuliana Minghelli and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giuliana Minghelli uses Italo Svevo's parodic Darwinian fable of the prehistoric encounter between the weak and 'unfinished' man and an incommensurable other to reassess his eccentric contribution to 20th century literature.
Download or read book Life Into Art written by Peter DAVIES and published by . This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Perfect Hoax written by Italo Svevo and published by Alma Books. This book was released on 2019-01-23 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing litterateur 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.
