This England Is So Different...: Italo Svevo's London Writings

by Italo Svevo, John Gatt-Rutter (Editor), Brian Moloney (Editor)

Italo Svevo spent many years in London working for a company based in Woolwich. During this time he wrote daily to his wife back in Italy, commenting on the issues of the day and giving his impressions of the English. Most of his letters are published in English translation here for the first time, and they give a unique insight into Svevo's time overseas.

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Aron Hector Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer.

A close friend of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Svevo was considered a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy and is best known for his classic modernist novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923), a work that had a profound effect on the movement.

Reviews

[Occhionelcielo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graditissimo dono natalizio, questo volume raccoglie la corrispondenza di Schmitz con la moglie dal 1901 al 1908.
Ne emerge il profilo di un innovativo imprenditore di successo, oggi si direbbe uno startupper, ben lontano dall'immaginarsi il destino di scrittore italiano più amato dai lettori forti.
Eppure, in queste e-mails ante litteram mi sono divertito a riconoscere tutti i tic e le ossessioni della personalità di Zeno; in alcuni passaggi mi sono letteralmente spanciato dalle risate.
In sintesi, una preziosissima guida involontaria a quello che per me resta "Il Mio Libro".

[Tom M (London) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schmitz's daily letters from London to his wife in Trieste are partly intimate and partly to do with his activity setting up and managing the new London branch of his wife's family's business, producing special hull paints for ships. His forced migration to a completely alien country (England) leads to many interesting observations about the strange ways of the English, the terrible weather, the food, and his great difficulties learning the language. These outward observations are accompanied by more intimate, almost claustrophobic concerns about family matters back in Trieste and an enduring frustration at not being able to be with his wife, of whom at a distance Schmitz seems to have been obsessively jealous, demanding (for instance) full details of who she saw at the theatre and to whom she spoke. Schmitz's descriptions of setting up and running the paint factory are most interesting for the relationships between his English employees and their Italian factory managers and himself, the boss. These foul processes seem to have had disastrous effects on the health of the workmen and surprisingly, for a bourgeois of vaguely socialist leanings, very interested in writing newspaper articles about the the big coal-miners' strikes immediately after the First World War, so far as the welfare of his own workmen was concerned, Schmitz seems more bothered by the visits of the health and safety inspector than by any direct concern for their health.

Throughout the book we sense Schmitz's view of himself as a failure, an anti-hero much given to self-deprecation, but with an acute and intelligent perception of a world around him that was changing quite suddenly from the Belle Epoque to a thundering, noisy industrial modernity in which everything was going faster and faster and cities like London were growing rapidly in size.

HIs interesting newspaper articles about London are alas, so poorly translated that they read as though translated by an Italian with very poor command of English and in general, the letters and other pieces do not read well. The two authors are to be congratulated for having put together a book that must have required a great deal of hard work and research, but it is a pity they did not entrust the translations to someone more professional.