Product Description

This enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business or make sense of his private life. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination ZENO'S CONSCIENCE has provoked enormous affection in its readers both in Italian and English since its first publication in the 1920s.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83433 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-26
• Original language: Italian
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

About the Author
Italo Svevo (1861-1928) lived most of his life in Trieste, now part of Italy, but then a port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is his greatest work, seen by James Joyce as one of the century's handful of masterpieces. His other novels include AS A MAN GROWS OLDER and A LIFE. William Weaver is most famously the translator of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.

Customer Reviews

Well worth reading
Although this book seems largely unknown to British readers it has an important place in European literature. Svevo was one of the first writers to be influenced by Freud and this novel deals with his family and romantic relationships in this light.
The narrator is very self-aware as he tells his life story as part of his therapy, and this gives a very interesting insight to his cigarette addiction, marriage, affair, business dealings... Although it's also evident that he's creating his own version of events that will rationalise his actions.
The writing is at times too prosaic for my tastes, but this adds to the realistic story, and is perhaps the most important part of the book - the fact that it is the ordinary events of life that matter most (and that must surely be what drew Svevo to the attention of James Joyce who was one of the first people to promote him).

Very rewarding
This book is an ironic twist on Freudian analysis. The protagonist (Zeno) is trying to give up smoking and, under the influence of the psychotherapist Dr. S., is reviewing the major events in his life to discover why he is finding it so difficult. Svevo was apprently not a fan of psychoanalysis (which was still in its infancy when the book was written) and his use of it as a framework is heavily ironic.
The chapters are structured around a few important events (the death of his father, marriage, an affair, a business failure) and these are not in themselves particularly special. The beauty of the book is the honesty with which Zeno records his thoughts and feelings. The attitudes he has are not always the ones most acceptible to the world, and it is this difference between his inner monologue and the way he behaves that sets the book apart. He is a weak and vain man, but he is a good man, something of an everyman. Because of this ordinariness, it was easy to identify with him (for me at least). This made the reading of an admittedly slowgoing book very easy indeed, and I recognised bits of myself time after time, which is a testament to Svevo's observation of people (and of himself). The book is slow and generally lacks a clear narrative, so won't be to everyone's taste, but I found it a very rewarding read.

Brilliant Italian novel with quite a prolonged narrative
Svevo's novel is intended to constitute the confessions of its narrator, a chain-smoking hypochondriac named Zeno Cosini. These confessions are produced at the behest of Zeno's psychoanalyst and take the form of a series of elliptical episodes, which cover the breadth of his life. Amongst other things, Zeno details his unpremeditated marriage proposal to a woman who he doesn't initially desire. In fact, much of the novel entails the narrator reflecting on his volatile relationships with others, particularly his brother-in-law Guido,his wife's sisters and his mistress.

The novel is humorous in places and provides an interesting insight into life, however fictional, in the city of Trieste. The justifications that Zeno provides for his, often morally reprehensible, actions are also quite interesting. Unfortunately, the narrative moves at a frustratingly slow pace and some of Zeno's musings are also slightly prolonged.