Italo Svevo's Novels

About Italo Svevo

Italo Svevo (Aron Hector Schmitz, 1861–1928) was the great Italian modernist novelist — a Jewish-Italian businessman in Trieste who wrote fiction as a secret vocation, publishing to near-silence until James Joyce championed his work in Paris. Confessions of Zeno (1923) is the masterwork: Zeno Cosini's psychoanalytic memoir, organized around his obsessions with quitting smoking, his marriage, and his business partnership, is the founding text of the unreliable narrator in Italian fiction. Svevo had published two earlier novels — A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898) — to similar neglect; the Joyce connection brought him European fame in the late 1920s, and he died in a car accident just as his reputation was finally established.