Zeno'S Conscience eBook

Italo Svevo, pseudonym of the writer and playwright Aron Hector Schmitz, was born in Trieste, a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, on December 19, 1861.
Until the age of 18, he studied at a German boarding school with his brothers, until he returned to Trieste, where he continued his studies for another two years, when his father declared bankruptcy and Aron was forced to look for a job to support himself. Over the next twenty years, he worked as a bank teller at... Unionbank from Vienna, an experience that would inspire him to write his first novel in 1892, One Life, who signed as Italo Svevo.
The reception of his debut work was weak, not improving significantly when, in 1898, he published... Old age.
A pacifist, humanist, defender of Democratic Socialism and, after the war, of a European economic union, he also contributed opinion articles to the socialist newspaper L’Indipendente during this period.
In 1896, he married his cousin, Livia Veneziani, and became a partner in the industrial paint business, used on warships, established by his father-in-law. The business flourished, and a branch was opened in England, where Svevo lived part of his life and where he met James Joyce. This friendship would strongly influence the future of both: Svevo would be Joyce's inspiration for the character of Leopold Bloom in the modernist classic Ulysses; and Joyce would determine the reception of Svevo's most important work, the psychological novel with a strong autobiographical bent. Zeno's Consciousness, self-published in 1923, whose hero, Zeno Cosini, in his quest to cure his tobacco addiction, cannot cope with the idea of ​​smoking one last cigarette.
On September 13, 1928, while returning with his family from the Bormio thermal baths, he succumbed to injuries sustained in a car accident and died at the age of 66, leaving behind his fourth novel, Il Vechione — a continuation of Zeno's Consciousness — to be completed.