SOURCE: A review of Short Sentimental Journey, and Other Stories, in The New York Times Book Review, Sec. 7, April 9, 1967, pp. 4, 19.

In the following review of Short Sentimental Journey, and Other Stories, Simon describes Svevo's writing as both realistic and poetic. He concludes: "Svevo saw life as a joke Mother Nature plays on us, and his fiction laughs at it and helps all of us fellow-victims to laugh. "

The four best pieces in Svevo's Short Sentimental Journey and Other Stories are those which come from the ambience, in time and sensibility, of that late masterwork, The Confessions of Zeno. Its protagonist is the hero as neurotic, as compulsive smoker, hypochondriac, sufferer from a premature sense of senility; but Zeno is also the man who becomes so happily absorbed with himself that his failures turn into successes, neurosis becomes livable-with, sickness becomes health. Zeno, moreover, like every other Svevian protagonist...