It was the foible of the heroes of Italo Svevo's novels to wake up each morning believing that, through their own striving, some splendid vita nuova might have begun and they might at last have become a quite different person; and it was the theme of their cheerfully Schopenhauerian creator that this was the most unchanging thing about them. (As it was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: 'Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!') All the same, despite Svevo's rule, there have been a few people - Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind - who not only went on expecting to be transformed, but managed to be so - and this without much reference to age. I come fresh from reading Ray Monk's enthralling biography of Wittgenstein, a man who lived for change and through change and put all his genius into it.

LRB 5 December 1991 | PDF Download