Can I read A Very Old Man : Stories on EtoBox?

A Very Old Man : Stories by Italo Svevo; Frederika Randall; Nathaniel Rich is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is A Very Old Man : Stories about?

"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.

Author

Italo Svevo; Frederika Randall; Nathaniel Rich

Publisher

NYRB Classics

Published

2022

Language

EN

ISBN

9781681375946