SOURCE: "The Merchant of Trieste," in The Nation, Vol. 213, No. 9, September 27, 1971, pp. 277-78.

In the following favorable review of Further Confessions of Zeno, Markmann discusses the comparisons of Svevo with Marcel Proust, André Gide, James Joyce, and Luigi Pirandello.

Works left unfinished because of the author's death are always a calculated risk; yet there are writers who in one sense must come out ahead on such gambles, regardless of any seeming short-term loss; the very failings of the fragments drive readers into the rediscovery of the artist at his best. One could hardly assay with any justice this projected variorum of sequels to The Confessions of Zeno without going back first to that ancestor that reminds us once again of our debt to James Joyce the discoverer, as well as James Joyce the writer.

On the Confessions of Zeno, Svevo's Enduring Novel:

The Confessions of Zeno has kept...