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A review by shivani_maurya
The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl by Italo Svevo
3.0
"Ah! Another tale of Old/Young love!" Now, let's be honest here..That's probably the first guess anyone would make after reading the title (and not the blurb, duh!)..Alright, Alright..It might also be a story where the Nice Old Man helps the Pretty Girl find her way in life..Coz you know, he is Nice and all that..I think, Svevo knew better than doing that to his readers..and went with the first guess..
Are you imagining the form this love takes? I did..Perhaps a brief affair with no strings attached? A lapse of judgement with torrid love-making and hasty goodbye? A sincere longing for new love? Well, it's all that and much more..
Now that you know better you might expect to find an old man mooning over a young girl..Well, I wish he had done just that..In retrospect I can add here..that the parties involved could be charged with prostitution, but for their continually morphing relationship and mutual consent..Hold your horses!! Svevo has upped the ante on how nice one can be..or atleast try to be..And there is no getting past our "Nice Old Man"..The book is not so much about the "forbidden love" as it is about our "nice old man" trying..and let me warn you, he tries real hard..to be nice..And for a better half of the novella wrings his mind and puts it through imaginary tortures..All of it to assuage his conscience..
It is funny how people nonchalantly talk about Karma, as if it is prowling about waiting for the right moment to pounce, when they should talk more about the conscience..One can wait for Karma to catch up..But one can never get rid of the conscience, that unrelenting force breathing down one's neck with life of its own..And it is the conscience that comes full force in this novella..Not as after the fact guilt..No, the old man is too nice to feel guilty about something..So he sets about fitting his actions under the stretched envelope of social norms..And doing so costs him a lot..physically, mentally as well as morally..
This is a short read..Little boring towards the end..But Svevo has kept it from becoming unbearable..barely, but surely..And one finds his means to that end absolutely justified..
Are you imagining the form this love takes? I did..Perhaps a brief affair with no strings attached? A lapse of judgement with torrid love-making and hasty goodbye? A sincere longing for new love? Well, it's all that and much more..
Now that you know better you might expect to find an old man mooning over a young girl..Well, I wish he had done just that..In retrospect I can add here..that the parties involved could be charged with prostitution, but for their continually morphing relationship and mutual consent..Hold your horses!! Svevo has upped the ante on how nice one can be..or atleast try to be..And there is no getting past our "Nice Old Man"..The book is not so much about the "forbidden love" as it is about our "nice old man" trying..and let me warn you, he tries real hard..to be nice..And for a better half of the novella wrings his mind and puts it through imaginary tortures..All of it to assuage his conscience..
It is funny how people nonchalantly talk about Karma, as if it is prowling about waiting for the right moment to pounce, when they should talk more about the conscience..One can wait for Karma to catch up..But one can never get rid of the conscience, that unrelenting force breathing down one's neck with life of its own..And it is the conscience that comes full force in this novella..Not as after the fact guilt..No, the old man is too nice to feel guilty about something..So he sets about fitting his actions under the stretched envelope of social norms..And doing so costs him a lot..physically, mentally as well as morally..
This is a short read..Little boring towards the end..But Svevo has kept it from becoming unbearable..barely, but surely..And one finds his means to that end absolutely justified..