A Life (Twentieth Century Classics S.) - Softcover

Svevo, Italo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140181865 ISBN 13: 9780140181869

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1991

Synopsis

First published in 1893, this novel is concerned with the bourgeois soul and its inability to will or act. The heroes are typically men of business, but with cultural pretensions and he depicts them in their free time when they are not working.

About this title

Review

'Svevo is perhaps the most significant Italian modernist novelist' -- Times Literary Supplement

'If you have never read Svevo, do as soon as you can. He is beautiful and important' --New Statesman

'Perhaps in the final estimate the most important work of James Joyce will not be Ulysses, but the discovery of Italo Svevo' --Daily Telegraph

'The book throbs like a wound... A master' --New Yorker

About the Author

Italo Svevo was born in Trieste in 1861. His real name was Hector Schmitz. Educated mainly in Bavaria, he wrote in Italian, and as a young man had to work as a French and German correspondence clerk in a Trieste bank. He was not happy in the business world and at the age of thirty-one he wrote A Life, and published it at his own expense. It was followed four years later by Senility, a novel of tortured eroticism. Both A Life and Senility were such failures that Svevo gave up writing for the next twenty years. During this time he became a good friend of James Joyce, who was also living in Trieste, and who was able to use his influence to make Svevo known in Europe. Svevo was just becoming recognised in Italy when he was killed in a car accident in 1928.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140181865
• ISBN 13: 9780140181869
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304