The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns: individual conscience versus social convention and the cost of desire. His novella is a marvel of psychological insight, following the man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications to their tragicomic end. It is presented here in a translation first commissioned and published by Virginia Woolfe for her Hogarth Press.