Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Very Old Man: Stories

A Very Old Man: Stories

Svevo, Italo
Randall, Frederika
Rich, Nathaniel

Paperback

HumorGeneral Fiction

Publisher Price: $15.95

ISBN10: 1681375931
ISBN13: 9781681375939
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Aug 30 2022
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
A newly translated collection of fiction by the influential Italian modernist, continuing on his landmark work Zeno's Conscience.

A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno's Conscience in 1923.

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 paterfamilias--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 hardheaded young Olivi, expresses, like the war veterans who were Mussolini's early followers, a sense of entitlement 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 onetime 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. It is they, he suggests, who offer a recognizably human countenance in a world ravaged by the ambitions and fantasies of its true believers.

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