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.

5 short stories and a play dealing with old age - its frustrations and consolations.

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.

"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.

Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John Freccero begins retracing the famous voyage recounted by the poet nearly 700 years ago. Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante’s great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem. Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature— Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo—demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante’s wake.

In this novel, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at 35, and Angiolina, a beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self torment, it is suffused with a tragic sense of existence.

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.

Edoardo Weiss (1889-1970) was a favored disciple of Freud and is acknowledged as the founder of psychoanalysis in Italy. Although he was the author of six books and over a hundred professional papers, he has remained a shadowy figure. In this volume, Paul Roazen provides a definitive portrait of this notable individual. Based on his extensive interviews with Weiss, Roazen evaluates the significance of Weiss's own contribution to psychoanalytic thought and practice and presents a fascinating picture of the reception given to Freud's thought in Italy.Despite his prominence, Weiss's life and work has not been well documented. Roazen shows that his links to modern Italian history and culture were extensive and closely bound to the political and social conflicts of the twentieth century. Born in the cosmopolitan city of Trieste, Weiss was the nephew of the novelist Italo Svevo, whose masterpiece The Confessions of Zeno remains one of the principle psychoanalytic novels in modern literature. Another Triestine, Umberto Saba, one of the great modern Italian poets, was Weiss's patient. Weiss's career also intersected with Italian politics. The daughter of one of Mussolini's cabinet ministers was one of his patients, an analysis that has raised questions about Freud's own relation to the Italian dictator. Roazen documents Weiss's tribulations in trying to establish a psychoanalytic culture opposed not only by the fascist regime but the Catholic Church. In spite of these instances of opposition, Roazen shows that the Italian intellectual world was highly receptive to Freudian ideas and that psychoanalysis is flourishing today in Italy.Weiss has never before been recognized as a front-rank analytic thinker, but he was leader of the movement in Italy, a country that mattered deeply to Freud. This, along with the genuine intimacy of his contacts with Freud makes Weiss a figure of considerable interest to students of psychoanalysis, Italian culture, and intellectual history.

...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.