As a young man, the Triestine novelist Italo Svevo’s favorite author was Schopenhauer. “The whole of Svevo’s life shows traces of the deep impression left on his mind by ‘the philosopher of pessimism,’” writes John Gatt-Rutter, in his recent, carefully researched, and richly detailed biography of Svevo1, “but his application of Schopenhauer was not the usual one.” A good thing, too, for it was Schopenhauer who wrote that we must “regard man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.” It was Schopenhauer, again, who set out the bleak terms under which, in his view, we all play the hopeless game of life:
The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists.
Italo Svevo believed all this, but he also believed that embedded in the tragedy of existence there was comedy. Man may be tragic in the long view but in the short view he was more often ridiculous; and this ridiculousness, along with making him comical, made him, in the work of the mature
