Zeno's Conscience

Born in Austrian Trieste of a Jewish Italian-German family, Svevo spoke German fluently and pursued a business career before taking up fiction under a pseudonym that means "Italus the Swabian" or South German. His Italian had indeed something foreign about it, as did the characterizations of heroes and heroines in his novels. His first novel, A Life (1893), published at his own expense, and his second, Senilita (As a Man Grows Older) (1898), were virtually ignored. Svevo might have despaired had it not been for his friendship with the expatriate Irish novelist James Joyce (see Vol. 1), with whom he exchanged language lessons in Trieste. Joyce's intervention eventually found a foreign audience for Svevo's third and perhaps best novel, The Confessions of Zeno (1923), first published and very well received in France. As Svevo's reputation spread, he was called the Italian Proust in France, the Italian Musil in Germany, and the Italian Joyce in England. Italian critics now point out that, despite Svevo's foreign success, it was an Italian, Eugenio Montale, who wrote the first significant critical appraisal in 1925. Still, by then Montale had already steeped himself in foreign literatures and could assume a foreign perspective, while more natively rooted Italian critics, including even Benedetto Croce, continued to discount Svevo as a writer writing to be translated.