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 ZenoтАЩs Conscience in 1923.
Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the startтАФaging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamiliasтАФeven as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of Italian fascism also cast a shadow over the bookтАЩs pages.
It opens with тАЬThe Contract,тАЭ in which ZenoтАЩs manager, the hardheaded young Olivi, expresses, like the war veterans who were MussoliniтАЩs 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.
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