Translated by Isabel Quigly
Introduction by P.N. Furbank

Italo Svevo, who died in 1928 and whose books include The confessions of Zeno and As a man grows older, has now taken his place alongside Kafka, Musil and Proust in modern European literature. This memoir of him by his wife of thirty-three years offers a discreet, yet revealing and often humorous portrait of an enigmatic man who was simultaneously a successful businessman and, almost till the last moment, an unsuccessful writer.

Livia Veneziani had known her husband’s family as a girl before marrying into it, and she set down her book after his death, surrounded by his unpublished papers and copious correspondence. She was also familiar with Svevo’s earliest associates and friends, and with the literary and political circles in which he was an active participant. She was thus able to supply the essential local background for understanding Italo Svevo and his largely autobiographical work, besides painting an engaging and sometimes surprising portrait of a man and a marriage.

In 1907, aged forty-six, Svevo became a private pupil of James Joyce, who was teaching English in Trieste. The two men struck up a friendship, documented in this memoir, which also records how Joyce’s influence, mainly in Paris, brought about the long-delayed first successful publications of Svevo’s work.

Published by Libris in 1989