Known for his experimentation in style, language, theme, and narrative technique, Italo Svevo is a seminal figure in the development of the modern European novel. Unappreciated for many years, Svevo did not gain critical and popular recognition until the popularity of formal, realistic storytelling enabled a new appreciation of modernist techniques. Now best-sellers, Svevo's Una vita (1892; translated as A Life, 1963), Senilità (1898; translated as As a Man Grows Older, 1932), and his most complex novel, La coscienza di Zeno (1923; translated as Confessions of Zeno, 1930), initially met with a public unprepared for his radical use of Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious and the innovative stream-of-consciousness narration later popularized by Svevo's friend and admirer James Joyce. Svevo developed--and, through the character of Zeno, perfected--the modern psychoanalytic narrative, in which the inept, introspective hero conducts himself more as an antihero, and the realist tradition of omniscient narration is abandoned in favor...