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Title: Emilio's Carnival by Italo Svevo, Beth Archer Brombert, Victor Brombert ISBN: 0-300-09049-8 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: the perils of an imaginary life
Comment: Emilio's Carnival, or Senilità, was written in 1898, a hundred years before an American president fell from grace on the account of his entanglement with a young intern and his propensity to debate the meaning of words, such as the word "is."
Emilio of the tile of this book -- middle-aged, middle-of-the-road writer working at a mediocre profession -- lives with his sister in Trieste, which, at the turn of the twentieth century surely must have been of one the great showcases of what solid bourgeois life was all about (or lacking in, depending on your perspective) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The book recounts Emilio's fall not from grace so much as from a delusional orderly heaven straight into the cold hell of a realization that much of his take on life and morality are but an illusion. And since Emilio's passions, such as they are, seem to have been spent on his -- and in his -- imagination, rather than in life or in giving voice to them through the arts, he is left in a state of inertia, or that of "senilità." In this sense, this novel is thoroughly modern, and Emilio's inner life is likely to be more than familiar to the folks equivocating on the frozen shores of "analysis paralysis."
Svevo narrates Emilio's entanglement with the cherubic-looking, but unselfconsciously promiscuous and vulgar, Angiolina with an almost unsettling edge of unreliability, provoking a sense of vertigo -- at least in this reader. What anchors the reader as he or she navigates through the precipitous landscape of Emilio's psyche are the passages in the novel that bring the city of Trieste to unequivocal life in all kinds of weather. That and the realistic descriptions of the last days of the lonely Amalia, Emilio's sister, who dies in an addiction-induced delirium and in "the agony reserved for the dissolute."
Irony, unreliability, delusions, and delirium are the prime forces that move the plot and shape character in this novel, bridging Svevo's world and ours and making this book a fresh read even now, even in the post post-modern literary world. I believe that the following quote from the novel sums up not just Emilio's problem but also Svevo's approach to literature in general: "He realized that the truth he was attempting to relate was less credible than the dreams he had fabricated as reality."
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Title: As a Man Grows Older (New York Review Books Classics) by Italo Svevo, Beryl De Zoete, James Lasdun ISBN: 0940322846 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 10 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo ISBN: 0375413308 Publisher: Unknown Publisher - Being Researched Pub. Date: 06 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, Danuta Borchardt, Susan Sontag ISBN: 0300082401 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo ISBN: 0679722343 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 18 June, 1989 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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