A meeting of two minds

This lovely, modest and precise book tells the story of the most productive friendship among the modernists, and the most surprising. Stanley Price calls James Joyce and Italo Svevo two of the four great modernists, along with Kafka and Proust. That may overstate the case for Svevo, but no reader will reach the delightful, happy ending of their friendship and begrudge a biographer’s warm enthusiasm. Few encounters between a paint manufacturer and a teacher of English as a foreign language have ever ended in a mood so like a fairy tale.

In 1904, Joyce arrived in Trieste with a woman he had met only four months earlier called Nora Barnacle. It was not a carefully considered destination. Joyce had run away from Ireland to Paris, where he hoped to earn some money teaching English at a Berlitz school. There was no vacancy, but he was told that there was one in Zurich.