Zeno's Conscience

by Italo Svevo

Hardcover, 2001

Status

Available

Call number

853.8

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Everyman's Library (2001), Hardcover, 496 pages

Description

The modern Italian classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is a marvel of psychological insight, published here in a fine new translation by William Weaver - the first in more than seventy years. Italo Svevo's masterpiece tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man paralyzed by fits of ecstasy and despair and tickled by his own cleverness. His doctor advises him, as a form of therapy, to write his memoirs; in doing so, Zeno reconstructs and ultimately reshapes the events of his life into a palatable reality for himself - a reality, however, founded on compromise, delusion, and rationalization. With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed "last cigarette!" (Zeno's famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) His amorous wanderings win him the shrill affections of an aspiring coloratura, and his confidence in his financial savoir-faire involves him in a hopeless speculative enterprise. Meanwhile, his trusting wife reliably awaits his return at appointed mealtimes. Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to he joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century.… (more)

Media reviews

literaturkritik.de

Zenos Handschrift ist die eines Triestiner Kaufmannes am Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts. Durchschnittlich gebildet, erfolglos in der Arbeit und anfangs unglücklich verheiratet, gibt Svevos Protagonist mehr Anlass zu Mitleid und oberflächlicher Belustigung als zu ernsthaftem Interesse. Gerade dieses

scheinbar allzu langweilige Durchschnittsschicksal macht auch die Schwierigkeit des Romans aus, der seine Qualitäten erst auf Umwegen preisgibt. Wer Zeno, wer Svevo verstehen will, muss bereit sein, nicht nur über ihn zu lachen, sondern ihn gar auszulachen. Lachen über diesen verschrobenen Hypochonder, diesen schrulligen Egoisten, diesen unfähigen Ehebrecher, diesen naiven Feigling, diesen Antihelden durch und durch. Wer ihn dann auslacht, erkennt, dass auch Zeno Zeno durchschaut und auch Zeno über Zeno lacht.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member araridan

Italo Svevo was 62 when this book was published in the 1920s. The book feels very much like an "old man" book and takes the form of a fictional memoir. I happen to like "old man" stories, and this was no exception. Each chapter is essentially a "chapter" from Zeno's life. There's the story of his

father's death, his marriage, his affair, and his business. I thought the first chapter dealing with his struggles with "last cigarettes" was pretty hilarious as was the story of his engagement to a woman he first dismissed as "ugly" while pursuing her more beautiful sister. Zeno's perspective is usually pretty funny and slightly neurotic, but he comes across as a particularly kind man even when he is engaging in behavior that could often be construed as less than moral or appropriate. I also find it humorous that the supposed reason for even writing this "memoir" is as an exercise prescribed by Zeno's therapist although Zeno himself believes the doctor to be pretty off the mark in his diagnosis, and Zeno confesses to often lying just to satisfy the doctor's theories. As a reader, we too cannot be entirely sure what parts of the memoir are "real" but I can't imagine anyone caring, because that streak of mischief is what keeps us attached to Zeno anyway.

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LibraryThing member Miguelnunonave

Written in a journal style, this is a rather interesting psychological novel with a very neurotic narrator. It is also a very good account of a time period and of a city (Trieste). Funny bits. Overall, though, I wouldn't go as far as saying this is the best early 20th-century Italian litterature

has to offer...

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LibraryThing member sb3000

Quite funny, with a deeply flawed but likable and all-too-human narrator. Highlights include an endless parade of "last cigarettes", a memorably difficult courtship involving three sisters, and the portrait, created in parallel with that of the main character, of the city of Trieste.

LibraryThing member jigarpatel

A self-conscious, comical hypochondriac charts his love and business life, which eventually intertwine. Given Svevo's own history, Zeon's Conscience can be compared to the Japanese I-novel. Note "conscience" in the title is meant in some archaic interpretation to mean "consciousness". There are

infidelities, there are business mishaps. Ridiculous self-justifications abound. Too verbose and meandering for me to truly enjoy. Not in the class of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, but if you liked one you will probably like the other.

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LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe

As part of his psychoanalytic treatment, Zeno is encouraged to keep a journal and write about various aspects of his life. This begins with the apparently banal subject of Zeno’s cigarette addiction. But each further attempt turns to more serious subjects — the death of Zeno’s father, the

story of Zeno’s marriage, his mistress, and his business partnership with his brother-in-law. Zeno concludes with a final section written during the first world war decrying psychoanalysis itself, . Throughout, Zeno is sceptical about the efficacy of this writing component of his cure. Yet he becomes increasingly enamoured of the story of his own life, regardless of how poorly he understands himself or others. Indeed, Zeno is the kind of unreliable narrator who is sceptical of his own narration. And so he often undercuts his accounts, sometimes even in the following sentence. And yet there is a charm here that captivates. Zeno is assuredly a fool. But no more so than each of the men he encounters in his life. Meanwhile all of the women he encounters (his wife, her sisters, their mother, his mistress) are paragons of virtue, kindness and forgiveness. Yet he also insists both that they know nothing, and worse that he knows nothing about what goes on in their heads. As you might suspect, we are moving swiftly in the territory of farce. So it is all the more surprising to find, by the end, how much pathos surrounds Zeno.

An unremitting, self-absorbed, untrustworthy first-person narrator can get tedious even over the short run. Yet Zeno continues to fascinate even as he drones on. Plus, with the level of self-effacement at hand, and the outright lies (enough of which get revealed to hint of more), it is hard to fathom what exactly to make of Zeno’s confessions here. His weaknesses, it seems, are his strength. And his all-too-human frailty, is in the end what confirms his humanity.

Well worth reading for its place in the history of modernism. But also worth reading because it is often very funny. And so, gently recommended.

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LibraryThing member caju

Zeno is the most selfish, cynical and ironic narrator I have ever seen. The funny is, some passages do reflect what we usually think under similar circumstances (though we generally discard those thoughts). I think this is the reason this book is so captivating, it shows how ridiculous a human

being can be.

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LibraryThing member michaelbartley

The teacher I had for the novel class, said this was his favotie nove.. While there were parts I liked overall I didn't think that highly of it. I did like the section about the death of his farther

LibraryThing member jwhenderson

A gritty English version by Italophile Weaver (Open City: Seven Writers and Rome, 1999, etc.) resurrects one of the indispensable 20th-century novels: the work of a prosperous businessman (whose real name was Ettore Schmitz), it’s a majestically ironic in-depth portrayal, in his own reluctant

words, of its eponymous protagonist’s ruefully unromantic struggles with his domineering father, then the querulous family into which he marries, as well as the ignoble ravages of adultery and aging, psychoanalysis and tobacco addiction. You can hear Flaubert’s pugnacious mandarin contempt for all things bourgeois, and Dostoevsky’s furious comic voice in “Svevo’s” measured revelations of the slow erosive effects of quotidian disillusionment and passivity. A revolutionary book, and arguably (in fact, probably) the finest of all Italian novels.

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LibraryThing member santhony

This early 20th century novel is ostensibly a journal kept by neurotic Italian businessman Zeno Cosini at the behest of his psychiatrist. Cosini, the heir to an import/export business which is managed in trust for his benefit, gives the reader his skewed outlook on such things as quitting his

cigarette habit, the death of his father, the courtship of his wife, his marriage and acquisition of a mistress among other seminal events in his life.

The stories are relatively amusing and are very much period pieces, depicting life in the Balkan port city of Trieste near the turn of the century. The final two journal entries, by far the longest, concerning his acquisition and management of his mistress and his business partnership with his brother-in-law, both begin with promise, but soon bog down and ultimately become annoyingly repetitive and tedious.

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LibraryThing member Maryka

This is an amazing book. Svevo was discovered by James Joyce who considered this book brilliant and helped Svevo find a publisher. A wonderfully done unreliable narrator.

LibraryThing member Princesca

How verbose...

LibraryThing member JVioland

"I want you to record your thoughts, Zeno. It'll be part of your therapy."
"Really, Doctor? Well, if you say so."
That's what the book is about. We discover who Zeno is by reading his entries. An interesting technique, but not very memorable.

LibraryThing member hippietrail

There seems to be a sometimes distracting mix of British terms (turning, tap) and American spelling (color) in this edition.

LibraryThing member stillatim

Someone needs to do a gigantic public service announcement and then create a computer virus that will delete all the sentences grouping this together with Ulysses and Proust and Woolf, all of whom are chiefly known for their formalism and prose.

This is Sterne in the late nineteenth century, no

more, except with workmanlike prose, rather than Sterne's endlessly propulsive rush of words. The chapters go on for far too long, and although they're quite funny, that's really about all there is to it. The unreliability of the narrator doesn't make the book a modernist masterpiece; that's how comic novels (and, indeed, poems) have always worked.

Having said all that, it is genuinely funny, and some of the scenes have stayed with me far more strongly than I would have expected. I just don't to spend hours looking back through the book to find those bits again.

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LibraryThing member ccatalfo

A classic of 20th century Italian literature.

LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini

I liked this because Zeno seemed more like a regular guy than just about anyone I've ever found in literature: mild, self-interested, inconsistent, given to dramatic gestures and hypocrisy, eager to be esteemed and loved and fairly lovable except when under duress. Says more about what I think a

regular guy is than anything perhaps, and his self-satisfied little pensées did run thin after a certain time (about where he starts to get all cod-Mussolinian, all "the only cry to be respected is that of the victor," but again, because we've been with him a bit and know he is a regular guy, we forgive him it more or less because we remember our own moments of lame-assedly trying on tough-guy armour in our own heads). That and the painterly, by which I mean workmanlike, painter-as-in-house-painter, rendering of family dynamics and business matters in Italo-Austro-Slavonic Trieste in the immediate pre-WWI, make this a pleasant entertainment.

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LibraryThing member samatoha

Wonderfull.Svevo is a genius.The psychology digging into Zeno's (and ower's) mind is brilliant and fascinating.

LibraryThing member jvhovig

Literary masterpiece, with a shocking final twist.

"Confessions of Zeno" is the journal of a middle-aged man in Trieste, Italy (in the NE, near Croatia, Slovenia and Austria). He first describes briefly his difficult relationship with his father, and his problems quitting smoking, but then moves to

the heart of his narrative, which concerns his life spent with a successful merchant-class family, with whose father he has a business relationship, and whose two daughters he desires a personal relationship.

He courts each daughter in turn, eventually marrying one, but keeps a mistress for a time, and comes to befriend the man who marries the other daughter, even entering into a business relationship with him. He manages to have a child, and lives a relatively quiet bourgeois existence.

The problem is, he is utterly detached, self-absorbed, and hypocritical. A narcissist's narcissist. When I say "business relationship", I use the term loosely. He despises honest labor!

Worse, during the various troubles he has with his friends and family, he cannot see it is his personality which causes them. The book is subtle and clever, describing the story through his eyes, but still making it clear he is usually the trouble-maker. The unreliability of a narcissist's narrative is its own undoing.

The journal was supposed to have been written for the sake of a psychologist, who is now publishing it to convince his patient he requires more therapy. For the greater part, it is a generally plain book, with interesting characters who take us through interesting adventures, even if those adventures are made comical by the man writing the tale, unaware what a clown he truly is.

But only by the end of the book does the book's full effect dawn on us, and we finally understand the psychologist. The ending is quite subtle. I was shocked enough to re-read the last few pages a few times before actually believing what it seemed to say. But the book's message was that much more effective because of this subtlety. After reading a "plain" book for so many pages, the ending is that much more powerful.

The book's style is clear and engaging, the characters well drawn and endearing, and the stories charming. Many readers will be happy enough to follow this "tragicomic" story for its own sake, but patient and insightful readers will be rewarded with a conclusion that forces them to question what the book had told them all along, and reflect on the meaning of life, love, family, and friendship.

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