Memoir of Italo Svevo

By Livia Veneziani Svevo and Liuia Venezaini Svevo

Book Overview

Writer Italo Svevo had many things in common with other writers: a long struggle for recognition; a friendship with a noteworthy author (in Svevo's case, James Joyce); and a long list of neuroses. His choice of a wife, however, was anything but common. Livia Veneziani Svevo tirelessly worked on her husband's behalf after his tragic early death and also penned this remarkable portrait of a serious artist and a loving (if quirky) marriage. Memoir of Italo Svevo tells the story of how a successful middle-aged businessman, as obsessed with smoking as with his abandoned literary ambitions, somehow became one of the great authors of the twentieth century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0910395578
• ISBN13: 9780910395571
• Release Date: July 1990
• Publisher: Marlboro Press
• Length: 178 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Confessions of Zeno...

One of the ironies of Italo Svevo's "Confessions of Zeno" is that the impulsive, undisciplined Zeno is supposed to have composed such elegant, disciplined prose. The life of Svevo -- actually the Austrian Ettore Schmitz, a writer of Italian educated in German, a businessman who hated business and a novelist not known to the world as such until James Joyce declared him Italy's best -- was rife with similar contradictions. In "Memoir of Italo Svevo" his widow, Livia Veneziani Svevo, offers herself as one key to his surprising success. Svevo began courting Livia, a distant cousin, when she was 18 years old and just out of convent school and he was 31 and working in a bank; once she stopped worshiping his literary genius, she began to see him as a man in pain. In simple, compelling language, competently translated by Isabel Quigly, Mrs. Svevo gives readers exactly as much as they need to move from one Svevo letter or diary entry to the next, and she reveals as little as possible about herself. The Svevo she depicts was, indeed, a brilliant, kind and misunderstood man. Her husband's correspondence with people like Joyce and the French critic Valery Larbaud is certainly interesting, but nonetheless, throughout this memoir, the voice of the real Livia, a woman of obvious character and the wife of -- let's face it -- a severe neurotic, is sorely missed.