Recommendations
Books Like Una vita (A Life)
Books for readers who loved Svevo's first portrait of the will-less anti-hero
Italo Svevo's 1892 Una vita introduces the Svevian type — Alfonso Nitti, a bank clerk who seduces his employer's daughter through literary collaboration and then cannot act decisively on any of his desires; the Schopenhauerian will-less man in his first incarnation. These eight books share that territory: the anti-hero who fails upward, the provincial man undone by ambition and paralysis in the city, and the literary tradition of the man who thinks too much to do anything.
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Oblomov
by Ivan Goncharov
The supreme portrait of paralysis and will-lessness in European literature — Oblomov cannot get out of bed, much as Alfonso cannot decide anything; 'oblomovism' is the condition Svevo's anti-heroes suffer from.
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The Diary of a Superfluous Man
by Ivan Turgenev
The original 'superfluous man' of Russian literature — the educated, sensitive provincial who cannot act, who fails in love and in life, and who provides the template for the Svevian type.
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Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
A man who never quite takes hold of his own life — William Stoner drifts into academia, a bad marriage, a failed love affair, and a quiet career; the most American analogue to Una vita's resigned anti-heroism.
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Buy on AmazonBel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
A young provincial man in Paris who seduces his way upward through newspaper society — the inverse of Alfonso, who cannot seize his opportunities, but the same world of social ambition and sexual calculation.
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Buy on AmazonHunger
by Knut Hamsun
A young man in Christiania, starving and unable to take the steps that would save him — the Hamsun protagonist shares Alfonso's paralysis and self-defeating behavior, pushed to an extreme of physical suffering.
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Buy on AmazonThe Aspern Papers
by Henry James
James's narrator pursues literary manuscripts with a ruthlessness he cannot quite admit to himself — the literary ambition and self-deception are Alfonso's, in a more cunning register.
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
A dead man narrates his own failed life with ironic detachment — the anti-hero looking back on his failures with more wit than Svevo allows Alfonso, but the same structure of a man who missed his life.
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Buy on AmazonBouvard and Pécuchet
by Gustave Flaubert
Two copy-clerks who retire to the country and fail at everything they attempt with magnificent systematic thoroughness — the anti-hero of failure taken to its absurdist, encyclopedic limit.
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