Italo Svevo Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce's seminal novel "Ulysses". "Confessions of Zeno" never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which rarely left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Svevo brings a keenly sardonic wit to his observations of Trieste and, in particular, to his hero, an indifferent man who cheats on his wife, lies to his psychoanalyst and is trying to explain himself to his psychoanalyst by revisiting his memories. There is a final connection between Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought psychoanalysis, he said, in
Là-bas (novel) Là-bas (novel) Là-Bas, translated as Down There or The Damned, is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1891. It is Huysmans' most famous work after "À rebours". "Là-Bas" deals with the subject of Satanism in contemporary France, and the novel stirred a certain amount of controversy on its first appearance. It is the first of Huysmans' books to feature the character Durtal, a thinly disguised portrait of the author himself, who would go on to be the protagonist of all of Huysmans' subsequent novels: "En route", "La cathédrale" and "L'oblat". "Là-Bas" was first published in