ABSTRACT
The short, gentle, and unpretentious memoir of Italo Svevo (1861-1928) that was written by his widow, Livia Veneziani Svevo (1874-1957), curiously suggests much more about a writer’s inner world than many biographies claiming to leave not a scandal or laundry list unexamined. And yet Livia admits that her husband, who was also a distant cousin whom she had known since childhood, never spoke to her about “his torment or his obsessions” and that she could not always understand his “dark degree of suffering.” “To me he showed only his cheerful face,” she writes. “He wanted me always to remain calm, simple and without inner complications, as if to draw strength from this way of being of mine.”
