One hundred years of Zeno. The most natural and daring outcome of the Italian novel
10 months ago
A century ago, in the spring of 1923, "Zeno's conscience" was published at the author's expense. Has there ever been a wiser, more natural and more open-minded Italian novelist than Svevo? Maybe not. After all, in our literature the novel has grown like an artificial flower – and in fact Ettore Schmitz, real name of the writer who underlined his double identity by signing Italo Svevo, was very little Italian. From an Austrian father, he was educated in a Bavarian boarding school. In addition to French storytellers and Darwin, he trained on Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, Marx (and then on Nietzsche and Freud). In Hapsburg Trieste he devoted himself to commerce, and in order to be able to manage the London outposts of his father-in-law's company he took English lessons from Joyce, who after a long failure from critics and the public made his fortune in France, like Montale in Italy. Svevo made his debut as a narrator in the period of aestheticism, revealing the shadowy truths with his gray style. “Senility”, from 1898, very much prefigures the 20th century, and seems made to be read with Girard's categories, given that it is all based on mimetic desires and scapegoats.
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