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“... ordinariness achieves a highly individual and idiosyncratic literary status – James Joyce and Italo Svevo. Growing older, a bit despondent, never feeling quite well – these are the symptoms of Svevan man which we all recognise, and from which we suffer ourselves. The Svevan ordinary man belongs to no recognisable social category. Neither has he any ...”

“... is Confessions of Zeno (to give it its familiar English title), which first appeared in 1923. Italo Svevo’s novel belongs recognisably to the comic tradition of Don Quixote and The Good Soldier Svejk, a comedy defined by Schopenhauer (a great influence on Svevo) as residing in the incongruity between our concepts ...”

“... my wife. After describing a scuffle with his son the narrator mentions with approval a scene from Italo Svevo in which a dying father uses the last of his strength to raise himself and slap his son’s face as hard as he can. Then the narrator adds: ‘I often imagined my own deathbed scene in those days, and I saw myself doing the same thing – only I ...”

“... published many novelists in translation after All Quiet: for example, Hans Fallada, Sholokhov and Italo Svevo. Of these three, Fallada is forgotten, Sholokhov in disrepute, and Svevo, but only after repeated failures, is established as an author of Penguin Modern Classics. His Confessions of Zeno was one of the rare ...”

“... pupil and friend Ettore Schmitz would later – encouraged by his teacher – become famous as Italo Svevo. It is all, in fact, rather Irish. McCourt is enthusiastically aware of this, and argues persuasively that Joyce recognised it too. Sometimes he takes it a step too far: when the Virago in the Circe section of Ulysses says, ‘More power to the ...”

“... of Zeno, the definitive European novel about trying to quit, by Ettore Schmitz, better known as Italo Svevo. In both sections, Klein strays into the difficult terrain of psychoanalysis and emerges in reasonable shape. Svevo was in any case a rebel of the couch, for whom the smoking cure was a preferable way through ...”

“... relish’ and then added the remark that would have made both him and Baudelaire good friends of Italo Svevo: ‘This may seem a futile remark, but it is a diagnosis which is rarely mistaken; when smokers and snufftakers no longer ask for tobacco, it is a bad sign; when they come back to it one is entitled to augur for the best.’ Alas, in the case of ...”

“... retirement allowance. However, to your list of writer/paint manufacturers I must add a third name, Italo Svevo, a converted Jew of Trieste, the author of The Confessions of Zeno, who lived from 1861 to 1928. For a long time Svevo was the commercial manager of a paint company in Trieste, the Societa Veneziani, that ...”

“... much of Coetzee’s recent fiction.’ It is in this mode that we hear, in Inner Workings, of Italo Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald. The method is less biographical for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ...”

“... in a story who finds he has been married off to the wrong sister (Jacob and Leah, and later, Italo Svevo in The Confessions of Zeno). But last year, when I heard the piece played on Radio 3, I found I could split it from its origins in papal ideology and propaganda uses of Mary. I could surrender to its beauty. This new serenity may be connected to ...”

“... abroad. He was friends with many of his generation among Italian writers and especially close to Italo Calvino. He was also a man who felt deeply both his own suffering and the suffering of those close to him. He was heartbroken over the self-destructive drunken decline and death of Lorenzo Perrone, the mason who, more than anyone, kept him alive at ...”

“... affected by this ‘demyelination’, as well as those connecting her left eye and her brain.In Italo Svevo’s novel Zeno’s Conscience, the protagonist is told that taking a single step requires the co-ordination of no fewer than 54 muscles. ‘Walking became a difficult labour, and also painful,’ ...”