I went back and forth on this novel a bit as I read. I think my feelings were framed by the contrast between the late 19th/early 20th century division between the realist (Verismo in Italy) and decadent schools of novel writing that immediately preceded the modernist experiment. I was at first rather angry at the narrator of Senilita' for his entirely indefensible attitude toward women--that it was fine that the protagonist, Emilio Brentani, as a middle-aged bourgeois man, take a lover with no intention of marrying her in a society in which the woman would face much more dire social consequences for such behavior. I was looking at the political/societal situation first and foremost but Svevo's novel is rather more firmly rooted in the decadent tradition, concerned with the interior emotional lives of the various characters rather than the societal double standard.

As the novel goes on the characters, their interior lives, sorrows and tragic misapprehensions became more and more engrossing and I was able, eventually, to stop grousing, to abandon myself to the reading, and to really enjoy the artistry behind this evocation of pre-WWI alienation and solitude in Trieste. By the end I found myself very moved. The novel is quite unflinching in its depiction of the loneliness of the unattractive, the foibles of a mediocre, middle-class middle-aged man and woman (Brentani and his sister, Amalia), and the casual vanity of those more suited to romantic encounters as exemplified by Emilio's lover, Angiolina and his best buddy, Stefano Balli. It's a slow build-up well worth the payoff of the final three chapters.

Another interesting aspect of this novel--which sheds light on Svevo's later triumph, La Coscienza di Zeno--is how Senilita' terms love as a kind of sickness from which our Emilio is forever trying to "heal himself." It says a lot about the rationalist, bourgeois mindset of late 19th century Europe. A man decides that he should take a lover, but not in a serious way, merely as a distraction or middle-aged pastime, because he's never done it before. As soon as he feels actual emotion for the woman he chooses--a vain and duplicitous woman apparently thriving on playing a field of lovers for perhaps her own ego as well as to support her family--he becomes vulnerable to her whims and lies, and this disruption of the power structures between them can only be seen from his point of view as an illness that he must cure. In the parallel narrative, Emilio's sister Amalia literally falls ill of her unrequited love for Emilio's best friend, the careless bachelor Balli. By novel's end, both are cured, in their own way. But, like so many of our modern medicines, one wonders what's worse, the cancer or the cure.

Also a funny note: The two women of the novel, Angiolina and Amalia can only remind of the three sisters with names beginning with "A" of Zeno: Ada, Augusta, and Alberta. There I have always assumed the women were meant to contrast with the "Z" of the narrator, Zeno, but here it just seemed like some weird predilection of Svevo's to match the women with "A"'s and the men with "B"'s--Brentani and Balli. Boh!