Zeno's Conscience

Tim Parks Let’s make a quick comment about Svevo. Svevo was not his real name. His real name was Schmitz and he grew up as a German speaker in the area of Trieste where there was a big linguistic mix, so Italian was his second language. He had written a number of books which he self-published, which was quite common at that time, and received no attention at all really, so he was a failure in that regard. He worked as a businessman and he was quite successful in a company producing industrial paints for painting ships and things like that, which was a fairly big business in the Trieste area, then part... (Source)