As a Man Grows Older - Italo Svevo

Svevo's story is unique. As a young man in Trieste he wrote two unsuccessful novels, of which this is the second. In middle age he befriended a young Irishman living in the city. He happened to mention his writing. The young man happened to be James Joyce. A decade later, the now famous Joyce found a publisher for Svevo's third novel, The Confessions of Zeno, which was published with great success in 1923, thereby encouraging English language translations of the earlier novels including this, in 1932, by Beryl de Zoete. Svevo had finished a fourth book and started a fifth when he died in a car crash in 1928. I'm guessing the car was the product of his belated success. And his name wasn't Italo Svevo anyway. He was Ettore Schmitz. Nonetheless his widow called herself Livia Svevo when she published a memoir of her husband.

Emilio Brentani, the hero of As a Man Grows Older, is a self-portrait. Like Svevo he aspired to literary success when young and missed. He now has a dreary office job and lives with his spinster sister Amalia, in Trieste, of course; nowhere could be better suited to this nowhere nobody. Emilio still considers himself an artistic man about town. He cultivates artistic friends like the sculptor Balli and - the modernist touch which appealed to Joyce - he overindulges in fashionable self-scrutiny. Every action, every emotion is gone over and over in his head, almost as if he is living an autobiographical novel. When he falls head over heels for the beautiful young Angiolina he builds himself a mountain of reasons why he shouldn't. His friend Balli, who fancies Angiolina himself and, in any case, doesn't want to lose his friend Emilio, encourages his neurotic behaviour. Emilio's sister Amalia, the only other significant character in the novel, likewise frets about losing her protector whilst consoling herself with erotic dreams of the flamboyant alpha male Balli. Angiolini couldn't care less. She is a poor young woman who knows that her beauty is her escape. She has had plenty of suitors before and makes no attempt to hide them. Emilio gets so tangled up in his strategems that he encourages her to become engaged to an unscrupulous tailor. He encourages her to sleep with her fiance so that he, Emilio, doesn't have to shoulder the guilt of deflowering her. Angiolina has no problem with this; her virginity is a distant memory - and, of course, the tailor dumps her the moment he has had his wicked way.

It is plain, spinsterish Amalia who pays the heaviest price for all this neurasthenic nonsense. Emilio comes home one day to find her literally deranged with frustrated passion. Emilio at least has the human decency to look after his sister, though not without asking Balli's advice first and accepting the medical guidance of Balli's friend, who cheerfully admits he has no idea what he is doing. It doesn't end well. Angiolina, meanwhile, has eloped with a cashier who has prudently robbed his own bank. Even then Emilio has to go through an elaborately staged charade of him abandoning her.

The novel is light but very modern in its time and still entertaining today. It is nothing like a Joyce novel but you can easily see what appealed to him here. Svevo is a writer who deservedly stands on his own, a unique voice unfairly forgotten.

Casanova's Homecoming - Arthur Schnitzler

Set, naturally enough, in Italy in the 18th century, this novella is a variant on Schnitzler's usual microscopic analysis of fin de siecle Viennese society.  The theme, however, is his usual - the self-indulgence of sex.

The aged roue is marooned in Mantua, desperate to be allowed to return to his home city after 25 years.  He meets, by chance, Olivo, a local landowner who, fifteen years earlier, Casanova loaned money to in order to marry.  Being Casanova, his motives were not disinterested.  He had already slept with the bride's mother and now slept with Olivo's intended, Amalia, before agreeing to the loan.  Olivo, however, knows nothing of this.  He is delighted to see Casanova, invites him to his country house and insists of repaying the loan.  Amalia is equally pleased to see Casanova.  He even convinces himself that she is eager to revisit their earlier tryst.  But his true target is Olivo's neice and ward Marcolina, a mathematics prodigy a third of Casanova's age.  He determines to have her at any price.  After all, he reasons, she is not a virgin.  He has seen the dashing Lieutenant Lorenzi leaving via her window at dawn.

Schnitzler doesn't moralise.  He wants us to form our own judgements.  It seems to me that while Casanova considers himself the great lover he always in fact contrives to pay for sex like some hideous eighteenth century kerb-crawler.  He is a predator, devoid of conscience.  He is vile, and he returns to Venice to become a paid informer for the Senate, a vile profession.  I was startled, initially, that there is no comeback for his theft of Marcolina's favours.  I had assumed that the tables would be turned and he would himself have been decieved by Amalia or one of the other women he now disdains.  But there wasn't, and that's the point.  The likes of Casanova always get away with their crimes.  The only price he has to pay is that he has to live with himself.  Only in his dreams does his essential humanity surface in horror and disgust, which it does in the sex-sated dream he has immediately after having his way with Marcolina.  You know Schnitzler has a point to make when his paragraph stretches over pages.