Una vita Reading Order

Una vita (A Life, 1892) is Italo Svevo's first novel — published at his own expense in Trieste under the pseudonym Italo Svevo (a pen name meaning 'the Italian Swabian', a nod to the polyglot German-Italian-Jewish world he inhabited), it was commercially ignored and critically invisible. Alfonso Nitti is a young man from the country who comes to Trieste to work in a bank, bringing with him literary ambitions and the conviction that he is a figure of finer sensibility than his circumstances. He falls into an affair with his employer's daughter Annetta, seduces her partly through literary collaboration (they are writing a novel together), and then finds himself unable to act decisively on anything — unable to pursue the relationship to marriage, unable to leave it, unable to work seriously on his novel, unable to return to his dying mother in time. The novel ends in suicide. Svevo's model is Schopenhauer: Alfonso is a man in whom the will has failed, in whom the capacity for decisive action that the world demands has been replaced by a paralysis of excessive reflection. The influence of Zola is also visible in the detailed portrait of the bank as a social world. Read today, Una vita is interesting primarily as the first appearance of the Svevian anti-hero — the ineffectual, self-deceiving, will-less Triestine man — who will be perfected in Emilio Brentani in Senilità and brought to comic apotheosis in Zeno Cosini.