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37 pages

English

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Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing litterateur Mario Samigli: he dupes him into thinking that a representative of a prestigious Viennese publishing house wants to commission a German translation of a long-forgotten novel Samigli had written and published at his own expense forty years ago. This leads the old man to reach new heights of self-delusion, spurred on by Gaia's succession of ruses.In this tragicomic study of deception and disappointment, Italo Svevo - who himself was an undiscovered writer until his old age - parodies elements of his own life and offers an insightful psychological portrait of a person who has lost touch with reality.

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Publié par	Alma Books
Date de parution	23 janvier 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780714549347
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Perfect Hoax
Italo Svevo
Translated by J.G. Nichols

ALMA CLASSICS

alma classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.101pages.co .uk
The Perfect Hoax first published in Italian in 1929 This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2003 This revised edition first published by Alma Classics in 2019
Translation and Introduction © J.G. Nichols, 2003, 2019
Cover design: Will Dady
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-775-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
Introduction
A Perfect Hoax
Note on the Text
Notes

Introduction
Italo Svevo’s A Perfect Hoax , although a slighter work than the three long novels on which his reputation most firmly rests, is clearly cut from the same cloth. It is not difficult to trace autobiographical influences in the novels: in this shorter work I have the impression that Svevo went out of his way to stress its relation to his own life, almost as though he intended it to be read as a personal confession.
His pseudonym Italo Svevo (which translates literally as “Italian Swabian” and mirrors his true Italian forename, Ettore, and German surname, Schmitz) emphasizes his dual background: his mother was Italian and his father of German descent. His protagonist in A Perfect Hoax has a purely Italian name, and (fortunately for his tormentor) knows almost no German. Nevertheless, the importance of Austria and the German language in his, and his author’s, native city of Trieste is obvious throughout. More strikingly, the protagonist’s surname, Samigli, was one that Svevo had already used as a pseudonym in his journalism: the choice of it here can hardly be an accident. Mario Samigli, like Svevo, is a literary man, involved also in the world of business, although it must be admitted with less success than Svevo. Literary success came to Svevo very late in life, as did Samigli’s short-lived illusion of success. Svevo’s enjoyment of his genuine success was also cut short, by his death in a car accident – an instance of what Oscar Wilde described as life imitating art and, strangely enough, something Svevo always feared. With Samigli, literary success seems to come bound up with translation, as it really did for Svevo: he made his name with his last novel, La coscienza di Zeno , and its success was initiated to a large extent by its translation into French.
It is significant that the translators of that novel into English have to begin by coping with the difficulties posed by the word coscienza . This means both consciousness and conscience, and there is no exact equivalent in English, so that the translator must be partly wrong whichever he chooses, or else be guilty of an evasion, by translating it as, say, The Confessions of Zeno. This is not irrelevant to A Perfect Hoax , because in this story, too, consciousness automatically implies conscience. The story is a study in psychology, but, for all Svevo’s great interest in his contemporary Freud, the psychology is never a morally neutral matter of scientific cause and effect: the characters are seen as responsible for what they do, despite their remarkable ability to deceive themselves.
Some twenty years after Svevo’s death, his friend, the poet Umberto Saba, mentions Svevo describing how, as a businessman before the First World War, he more or less strolled into a contract for the supply of an anti-corrosive underwater paint to the British Navy – in those days an almost unbelievably lucrative deal. Saba uses this as an example of how matters of great importance are often decided rapidly, while trivialities can take up time: “It had taken five minutes for his precious underwater paint to be adopted by the most powerful fleet of warships in the world.” Saba mentions how Svevo had afterwards a vague feeling of guilt mixed with his elation. With that mixture of feelings, and that wholly unjustified and yet all too human feeling of guilt, we are in the world of Mario Samigli.
The story’s mixture of tones – from the solemn to the ludicrous, from the gentle and affectionate to the sheerly hateful, from the trivial to the impressive – is at one, of course, with the absurdity of the events. This absurdity includes what happens inside people’s minds. As an instance, it is ridiculous that Samigli should be taken in by such a hoax, and yet all too believable also, for reasons which Svevo spells out later in the story. Similarly, the strange way in which he comes to realize he has been deceived (strange in the way the action unfolds, and strange in the way his mind responds) is not only believable but also uncomfortably and comically familiar to the reader. The story is not short on external incident, but it is the internal action which matters most.
This is why the objection that has sometimes been made to Svevo’s work – that he deals with trivial matters in a provincial backwater – is quite beside the point. He clearly shies away from the grand and portentous, but this story is, in its own refreshingly gentle way, concerned with some of the outstanding themes of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. There is, for instance, the apparent opposition between the worlds of business and of art, or between the artist and the bourgeois world around him – an important theme in the last century: we need but mention Thomas Mann. There is also acute insight into the nature of the literary artist himself, and how he cannot help trying to transpose experience into an objective form: Mario Samigli is a mostly ineffectual writer, but he has the true artistic urges, and in fact his fables are, in their small way, quite effective. In his blundering way, too, Samigli does, despite his apparent ignorance of it, have a good intuition of how the literary market works.
It is not difficult for any writer to present us with absurd events. The trick is to present absurdities which are reminiscent of our own experience and therefore utterly believable. There are many such in this book: the relationship between Mario and his brother, which is based on a series of half-conscious pretences on both sides, and yet based very securely and affectionately; the strange and yet perfectly natural way in which Mario unconsciously colludes in his own deception; the even stranger way in which he finally realizes what he has, in some corner of his mind, known all along; and, the best example of all, the totally unexpected double denouement.
It is in this denouement that the story reaches its artistic perfection. The last thing we expect from Mario Samigli is physical violence, and yet we ought to have expected it. The incident also reveals something about ourselves if – as I must admit I do – we delight in the battering of Gaia. Unconsciously we have been hoping for something like this to happen, and the fact that Gaia is evil does not make our own reaction any more admirable. With the second denouement, the fulfilment of an ambition which Samigli did not have (commercial success) at the instant of finding that the success he hoped for is still eluding him – an achievement which comes by happy chance and the unselfish kindness of an uncomprehending friend – means that the cruelties along the way are ultimately subsumed into the benign, tolerant atmosphere which is the final impression the book leaves us with. As Saba noted, “He was a nice man, old Schmitz!”
– J.G. Nichols

A Perfect Hoax

1
M ario Samigli was a man of letters, getting on for sixty years old. A novel he had published forty years before might have been considered dead if in this world things could die even when they had never been alive. Mario, on the other hand, faded and feeble as he was, went on living very gently for years and years the kind of life made possible by the bit of a job he had, which gave him very little trouble and a very small income. Such a life is healthy, and it becomes healthier still when, as happened with Mario, it is flavoured with some beautiful dream. At his age he continued to think of himself as destined for glory, not because of what he had done or hoped to do, but because a profound inertia – the same inertia which prevented any rebellion against his lot – held him back from the effort of destroying a conviction formed in his mind so many years before. And so in the end it became clear that even the power of destiny has its limitations. Life had broken a few of Mario’s bones, but it had left intact his most important organs – his self-respect, and even to some extent his respect for others, on whom glory certainly depends. In his sad life he was accompanied always by a feeling of satisfaction.
Few could suspect him of such presumption, because Mario concealed it with the almost unconscious shrewdness of the dreamer, which allows him to protect his dream from any conflict with the hard facts of this world. Nevertheless, his dream did at times become apparent, and then those who liked him defended that harmless presumption of his, while the others, when they heard Mario judging living and dead authors decisively, and even citing himself as a precursor, laughed, but gently, seeing him blush as even a sixty year old can, when he is a man of letters and in that situation. And laughter, too, is a healthy thing and not wicked. And so things went very well with all of them: with Mario, his fr