Heteronym
New Member
In this short novella Italo Svevo introduces us to Mario Samigli, a 60-year-old country writer who considers himself a literary master for having written and self-published a novel in his twenties that no one has really read. Poor Mario dreams of having his novel published outside Italy and receiving all the glory he believes he deserves. While this doesn’t happen he entertains himself writing fables about birds.
His world is turned upside down when an old friend, a failed poet and full of Mario’s arrogance, convinces his friend that an Austrian publisher is interested in translating his novel worldwide.
It’s a nice novella in which Svevo explores self-delusion: Mario is really a self-absorbed man, who seeks undeserved fame and takes out his daily frustrations on fables he writes every day, always about birds and always with crude moral points that would make Aesop feel embarrassed for having invented the format. Svevo deals with it humorously, but he also shows the cruelty of a hoax taken too far.
I think I’ll have to include Svevo in my pantheon of Italian writers, along with Papini, Buzzati and Calvino.
His world is turned upside down when an old friend, a failed poet and full of Mario’s arrogance, convinces his friend that an Austrian publisher is interested in translating his novel worldwide.
It’s a nice novella in which Svevo explores self-delusion: Mario is really a self-absorbed man, who seeks undeserved fame and takes out his daily frustrations on fables he writes every day, always about birds and always with crude moral points that would make Aesop feel embarrassed for having invented the format. Svevo deals with it humorously, but he also shows the cruelty of a hoax taken too far.
I think I’ll have to include Svevo in my pantheon of Italian writers, along with Papini, Buzzati and Calvino.