A Life     by Italo Svevo Original title: Una vita Original language: Italian Published by Pushkin Press Limited Pub. Date: 2002 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.18 x 6.52 x 4.80 ISBN: 1901285359 List Price: $18.00, £12.00 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.60 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.60 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

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Alfonso Nitti is a young man with a strong literary vocation who has come from the country to Trieste to work in a bank. Meeting Annetta, his employer’s daughter, opens the doors of the sophisticated world to him and, sharing a passion for literature, they begin writing a four-handed novel together. When they fall in love with each other, he, dissatisfied and

unhappy, detaches himself with the excuse of his mother’s poor health. But he can’t evade the crushing weight of reality he felt overwhelming him by running away: his mother’s death and the news of Annetta finding a new love, throws him into the state of defeat and failure which is the trademark of Svevo’s characters. He gives in to it and kills himself.

The book’s title comes from Nitti’s suicide; it’s the end of a life, one of the many anonymous lives marked by tragic impotence, their natural impetus broken by rigid class conditioning.

Svevo’s first novel is about ambition and innocence, about the desire for social improvement and faithfulness to one’s own dreams. Svevo himself said of it many years later, in a letter to Valéry Larbaud; ‘I read A Life again. James Joyce always said that a man has only one novel in him and when he writes others they are always versions of the same one. In this case my only novel would be A Life.’

‘...she then gave him her definition of life. Life was when he kissed her; nothing else was worth a thing. She was expressly renouncing all else for his kiss, he thought. As he kissed her to show his gratitude, it occurred to him that she must despise him if she considered herself to have lost the right to all other happiness by giving herself to him.... Alfonso’s happiness, if it existed, was diminished by a fear. Had this woman whose feelings and opinions had changed in a single hour maybe gone off her head? He felt himself reasoning as usual, calm, pulled along by his senses for short periods then satiated, and he could not imagine that in others emotion could always be maintained and equal intensity.’ p169