A Very Old Man: Stories

by Italo Svevo, Frederika Randall (Translator), Nathaniel Rich (Introduction)

A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine writer Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, when the international success of Zeno’s Conscience in 1923 had put an end to decades of literary neglect and set his imagination free. 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 pater familias—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 hard-headed young Olivi expresses, like the war veterans who were Mussolini’s early followers, a sense of entitled 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 one-time 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, whether at the office or at home. Absurd as such people may appear to others, and often to themselves, it is they, he suggests, who offer a recognizably human countenance in a world ravaged by the ambitions and fantasies of its true believers.

Frederika Randall’s new translation of A Very Old Man allows readers of English to encounter the final masterpiece of one of the twentieth century’s most original imaginations.

Genres: Short Stories, Italy, Italian Literature, Fiction

133 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2022

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

[haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to first read Svevo as a class requirement for this professor who hated my guts. Out of all the books we read, Zeno's Conscience was my second favorite (Wuthering Heights reigned supreme).

Svevo, or Schmitz, is able to create such an amusing meandering internal monologue for a pitiful, unlikeable man, in a way that really draws in the attention of the reader. I enjoyed reading this unfinished sequel, and will probably read it again someday, with its predecessor closer in memory.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Italo Svevo (1861-1928; born Aron Ettore Schmitz) was a novelist from Trieste condemned to a day job with his father-in-law manufacturing paint for ships. In his early 30s, he self-published two novels—A Life and As a Man Grows Older—which were, on the whole, roundly ignored. A couple of reviewers went out of their way to pan them. At that point, he gave up writing. (Or so he said to his family. I’ve read at least one account that claims he continued writing simple fables, one a day.) Twenty or so years later, the painting business picked up clients in Britain, and Svevo decided to improve his English by hiring a tutor—specifically, a young Irishman, about 25 years old, who recently moved to Trieste to teach English, James Joyce. Joyce—who once sneered at Proust for lacking discernible talent—came to discover Svevo’s earlier writings and praised them—a move Svevo was prepared to ignore as a kindness bestowed by someone receiving money from him, until Joyce began reciting pages of Svevo’s novels from memory.

Boldened, inspired, and made confident again by Joyce’s praise, Svevo cranked out Zeno’s Conscience, which was then published by one of Joyce’s friends (was it Ezra Pound?), and which received boundless praise from Europe’s top literary folk. Svevo’s joy at the attention was cut short when his chauffeur crashed their car into a tree, which precipitated the heart attack that killed Svevo. Now, finally (95 years after Svevo’s death!), Svevo’s notes for a sequel to Zeno’s Conscience have been published, key scenes less the connective tissue, and with a few narrative inconsistencies. Frederika Randall’s translation manages to capture the infinite variety of Zeno’s self-delusions, from begin forced out of the business he’s spent his entire adult life doing, to being a grandfather and (briefly) a mistress-keeper.

Part of Zeno’s charm is his recognition of his own flagrant hypocrisies in situations with bad outcomes where he can defer rightful blame from himself—with varying degrees of plausibility and self-delusion—to others. In lieu of then shaming those upon whom he has cast blame, he offers pity and a sense of moral example for his ability to forgive. Telling the unadorned truth doesn’t come naturally to Zeno—it seems to bare to be truthful. Some of his rationale is spelled out in his reaction to tales of womanizing told to him by his nephew Carlo, who is a cardiologist:

He [Carlo] boasts of his adventures, and his boasts are so cheerful I can’t help but enjoy them. Maybe I’ve been slightly dishonest, in that I exaggerate a bit. Not much, though, and not often. Only about the number of women. But I do exaggerate their attributes, yes. Although I never went so far as to boast of any princesses. There was one that I spoke of as a duchess so as not to confess she was the wife of a commendatore. I guess I could have said she was the wife of a cavaliere without being indiscreet, but I didn’t. I wanted to appear important to Carlo, and besides, being honest made me feel so good that I imagined exaggerating I was being even more honest. Maybe it was a way of finding out what I might have done, if others had let me. A confession more honest than mere confession.

When the First World War ended, so did many former business laws, taxes, and terms of deal-making; likewise, social culture allowed women more freedoms. While the new business pace confuses Zeno, he finds only inconvenience in his daughter Antonia’s refusal to modernize:

Antonia was dead set against the freedoms permitted to young ladies after the war. Not only wasn’t she interested in dancing, she wouldn’t leave the house by herself. She had to be accompanied everywhere by her mother or one of the maids, and the assignment of these duties was a real domestic problem, given the amount of surveillance she condemned us to. Sometimes even I had to leave home in the evening to take her somewhere, or fetch her. She was like a small bale of goods that could only be moved by a shipping agent.

In Zeno’s hands, the traditional act of chaperoning as a sign parental love, protection, oversight, and concern for a daughter’s reputation becomes a tedious act of needless surveillance. Rather than increase the daughter’s moral value, chaperoning only affects her market value and thus her ability to be off-loaded from one household to another, which doesn’t concern him much.

But it’s not as if Zeno’s household awaits his opinions with bated breath. When Bigioni, a suitor for his recently-widowed daughter’s hand, asks Zeno for his support, Zeno realizes that he—Zeno—has no influence over his own household. On the contrary, Zeno’s support of Bigioni would only push Bigioni further from his daughter—and from his son Alfio, whom Bigioni is also unsuccessfully trying to befriend. Only the eternally patient Augusta, Zeno’s wife, can put up with his typically male attempts at self-importance, a male self-importance that often reflects itself in ignoring what others say to him, including his old friend Misceli, who likewise ignores Zeno:

By now Misceli had moved on to quite different topics: stock market affairs about which he seemingly knew a great deal. He looked hot and somewhat distracted. As if, when he talked, he never listened to what he was saying. Like me, who also didn’t listen, but only stared at him, trying to determine what he wasn’t saying.

For a guy reading this, at least, it’s comically dismaying how many of my own attributes I can find in Zeno. Everything by Italo Svevo comes highly recommended.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Gary Reger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Italo Svevo has always been one of my favorite writers, ever since discovering that he was a close friend in Trieste of James Joyce, who lauded his books and encouraged him to publish.

A Very Old Man. Stories is a collection of five interlocked tales that Svevo intended as parts of a novel that his untimely death in an auto accident prevented him from finishing. His hero, Zeno, who figured in Zeno's Conscience, lives a life of some desperation in Trieste in the years after World War I. Trieste had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; in the negotiations at the war's end, Italy insisted the city be transferred to Italian suzerainty. Zeno doesn't know how to adapt to the new circumstances of his life; he is taken advantage of by his business partner, who steals his company; he engages in a desultory "affair" with a much younger woman, only to discover to his shock and despair that he's not her only patron--she's really a prostitute; his son refuses to enter any decent profession but spends his days painting paintings Zeno cannot (but pretends to) understand; his daughter is married to an arrogant fellow who displays no respect for his father-in-law.

Here are the germs of what surely would have been Svevo's greatest novel, had he lived to complete it. The stories, somewhat disconnected as they are, nevertheless repay reading for their clever writing, striking characters, and the portrait of a city slipping from Austrian to Italian culture. Svevo was one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and this new translation of A Very Old Man helps cement his reputation.

[Annie Schoonover · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the voicing in this. The translator's notes were fascinating also. Made me want to read Zeno's Conscience!

[Mason MB]

Hard to be fair to this w/o having read Zeno but i think i’d agree w my friends who found it to be just OK

[JAM · Rating 3 out of 5]

intentionally miserable.