'I only regret that you have wasted your talent on such a repulsive subject, for the story of a young man with so insignificant a life, without any moral backing, must surely so appear to you." Such ...

The very name of Ettore Schmitz is a testimony to the multicultural nature of the Trieste in which he lived. The Christian name is Italian, the surname is German and the family was Jewish. His parents ...

For 100 years, the works of Italo Svevo have sat on a shelf in a corner of the James Joyce industry. Novelist and modernist, Svevo--the nom de plume for Ettore Schmitz--earned this distinction for his ...

As a young man, the Triestine novelist Italo Svevo’s favorite author was Schopenhauer. “The whole of Svevo’s life shows traces of the deep impression left on his mind by ‘the philosopher of pessimism, ...

A Very Old Man, by Italo Svevo, translated by Frederika Randall. New York Review Books Classics. 224 pages. $15.95. “Mario Samigli was a man of letters, getting on for sixty years old. A novel he had ...

James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship, by Stanley Price (Somerville Press, 276 pp. $19.50) That the sense of place animates good writing is a truism of which our reading continually ...

Italo Svevo (real name Ettore Schmitz) was born in Trieste in 1861 and was almost overlooked as a writer during his lifetime. It was only with his novel "La Coscienza di Zeno" ("Zeno's Conscience") in ...

I spent much of my childhood in Dublin. For summer holidays, my grandparents rented a house at Sandycove, and I swam there in the shadow of the Joyce Tower. I was about 10 years old and just assumed ...