Customer Reviews

Emilio's Carnival

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Italo Svevo's novel Senilita is one of the great achievements in the bourgeoning era of early Modernism. It has rightly been credited as a forerunner and influence on James Joyce, and any fan of Flaubert, Chekhov, Proust, and Fontane (as well as less celebrated figures such as the Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson or the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis) will find much that is familiar, edifying, and entertaining in this intimate and masterfully observed novel. It is a book full of irony and empathy, artful paradox and plain-spoken truth; it stands half-way between romantic decadence and modernist realism, poised on the cusp of the 19th and the 20th centuries.

It is also representative of the most interesting trends in High Modernism precisely because of the self-consciousness of its atttiude toward narrative and language. Svevo, as is well-known from any synopsis of summary of his career, was an Italian Jew brought up primarily in a German-speaking milieu. He is therefore demonstrably and purposefully uncomfortable in his use of Italian (just as Kafka in Czech-speaking Prague is deliberately not quite at home with German, or many post-colonial writers from Africa or India are fluent writers of English but nonetheless not native speakers of the language--this disparity is by definition and design a feature of their writing). And although there is no explicit reference to Jews or Judaism anywhere in this novel, it is not difficult to extrapolate his anamolous presence as a Jew in Catholic Italy as a motivation for his estranged, alienated, detatched mode of storytelling and social observation.

These are factors that make Svevo an interesting writer and an important innovator in literary history. They also make him a surprisingly difficult author to translate--starting with the title of this book, which nobody, not even his friend James Joyce, seems to have understood or cared for.

Senilita is a great novel, but this is an unacceptably sloppy translation; it was so bad that I ended up buying the NYRB publication, which retains Joyce's preferred title, AS A MAN GROWS OLDER, just to wash the taste out of my mouth from this unidiomatic version. The NYRB translation, by the way, is also less expensive!!

I was most disappointed by this version's carelessness--frequently missing or misspelling words, and apparently making little effort to find an equivalent English idiom for Svevo's self-conscious Italian prose. The insight of Svevo's observations manage to shine through this dull translation, but not the enigmatic fascination of his writing style. Additionally, the preface is disorganized, repetitious, and as full of errors as the translation itself.

All of this is very surprising, coming from Yale University Press. The NB imprint intends to underscore the significance of writers such as Svevo to the international development of literary modernism. Why, then, have the publishers damned this great work with such a careless translation?

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."

This book is a passport.

Italo Sevo, as you might have guessed, was from Italy, although his prose is more Svevo than Italo and very Mitteleuropa, with his hometown of Trieste being a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

the highway scribe first heard of Svevo while he was browsing at Book Soup up on Sunset Blvd. There was another book of Svevo's there (title forgotten) that was done up in a bright yellowish-orange card stock with a neat painting inlaid to a small panel on the cover.

Books, whether we like to think much about it or not, are objects. The contents themselves remain code directed at varying types of minds, but the cover and size and ink and font are confected for the eyes, and usually with an aim to please them.

the scribe can admit that he will buy a book if it looks good as objet d'art.

A few years ago at the Sky Bar Halloween party (by the pool) the scribe went as a French intellectual with a long jacket, beret, horned-rim glasses and big green book of Montaigne's writings. He and Mrs. Scribe stole the show, she dressed as the French intellectual's little French maid. There are many who think Mrs. Scribe's black stockings and garters were the cause of the coupling's social triumph, but Mr. Scribe says it was the book, even if observers could not tell the drawings within were by Salvador Dali.

But we digress.

According to the guy who wrote the introduction of the edition with which we are here concerned, Victor Brombert, Svevo's real name was Ettore Schmitz.

He wanted to write as a young man, did, and then quit, "wounded by unsuccess," according to Brombert. He got married, had kids, and worked in the wife's family's paint business. Years passed, lots of them, and he met James Joyce who was in Trieste teaching English.

Joyce liked his book. You can fill in the rest.

The Italian title is "Senilitá."

Here's how Brombert describes the condition: "[I]t suggests a special sensibility (some people are indeed born old); or better still, a special kind of inertia of the dreamer, a modern version of acedia, or ironic ennui - devoid, however, of the metaphysical dimension Baudelaire gave to that term. `Senilitá', in Svevo's perspective, accompanies the tragic sense of existence; it represents a permanent premonition of life as a disaster, a deep skepticism concerning one's own potential, a ceaseless meditation on vulnerability and death, a wisdom that can be put to no use, an awareness of the unavoidable loss of that which one never possessed, a suffering sharpened while consciousness views itself as object and subject."

Do not try that at home.

Anyway, Joyce liked the title "Emilio's Carnival" for the English edition. Svevo was against it, dead-set against it, and to show you what happens even after you're a famous and dead scribe, there's the title that stands: Jimmy Joyce's title rather than the author's.

The book entails the wacky interior ups-and-downs of Emilio (it's his carnival) who lives alone with his sister, doesn't have a very exciting career, and, because of these circumstances, falls for a girl from the working classes named Angiolina.

She's quite hot this girl, hot enough to interest other men in the class above her own. Emilio becomes a lover she can apparently take or leave, acceptance often a question of whether she's in trouble and he can suit her purposes.

Emilio slowly, or maybe quickly, catches on to the fact that the girl of pure and fleecy soul he's concocted to match this girl of pure and peach skin is a fake; that looking virtuous and being virtuous are completely different things.

Of course, he's dipping downward and, in the conventions of his time, worthy of his own disgust so that he really never feels up to protesting her transgressions with much fervor. When he does, she invariably puts out, which tends to wash whatever thing he's been cooking up during idle days out of his frenetic brain.

Simultaneously, he's living with his sister Amalia. Amalia did not wander out of an Ayn Rand story. She is needy, dependent, meek, and suffering from low self-esteem, and it doesn't get any better for her once he starts skulking around with Angiolina, sexing her up at home while mom's in the dining room mopping.

A working girl's gotta do what a working girl's...

Anyway, she's no good, and his best friend Stefano Balli, a sculpture, does what he can to convince Emilio of this, but to little avail. She shines, she is bright, his life does not, is not. She calls, he comes.

It doesn't work. He tries to teach her his intellectual brand of socialism only to learn she hates her own class and would rather whore herself than be identified and bound to it. He tries to teach her virtue, she responds with chronic, almost innocent, lying.

Angiolina calls...

Back at the ranch, Emilio's sister Amalia has sunk into an alcoholic dissipation. So consumed is he with the, "should I, should I not?" of life with Angiolina that he doesn't realize Amalia needs help until it's too late.

Even in her dying night, he heads off to Angiolina for one more row that finally ends it.

If you want to know what happens next, well, nothing happens. Which is somewhat the point of the thing and why "Senilitá" is a better name than "Emilio's Carnival."

Worth a read. A look at the sexual tension festering beneath the mores of early 20th century European and bourgeois values and a fine example of how Sigmund Freud was burning a new consciousness into the best minds of his era.

"Trieste," Brombert writes, "itself became a literary subject for Svevo, whose writings remain associated with city's physical and mental setting, much as Balzac is linked with Paris, Joyce with Dublin, and Kafka with Prague."

So take a trip to Trieste.