Zeno's Conscience: A Novel [Paperback]

Italo Svevo (Author), William Weaver (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2003

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and endlessly self-deluding mind. The mind in question belongs to Zeno Cosini, a neurotic Italian businessman who is writing his confessions at the behest of his psychiatrist. Here are Zeno’s interminable attempts to quit smoking, his courtship of the beautiful yet unresponsive Ada, his unexpected–and unexpectedly happy–marriage to Ada’s homely sister Augusta, and his affair with a shrill-voiced aspiring singer. Relating these misadventures with wry wit and a perspicacity at once unblinking and compassionate, Zeno’s Conscience is a miracle of psychological realism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Svevo’s masterpiece . . . [in] a fresh translation by the dean of Italian literary translators.” –Los Angeles Times

“An excellent new rendering [of a] marvellous and original book.”–James Wood, London Review of Books

“A masterpiece, a novel overflowing with human truth in all its murkiness, laughter and terror, a book as striking and relevant today as when it was first published, and a book that is in every good way–its originality included–like life.” –Claire Messud, The New Republic

“Hilarious. . . . Effortlessly inventive and eerily prescient. . . . William Weaver . . . updates the novelist’s idiosyncratic prose with great affection.” –The Atlantic Monthly

“An event in modern publishing. For the first time, I believe, in English, we get the true, dark music, the pewter tints, of Svevo’s great last novel. . . . [Svevo is] a master.” –Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

“[An] exhilarating and utterly original novel. . . . Weaver’s version strikes one as excellent.” –P. N. Furbank, Literary Review

“One of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. . . . [Svevo is] perhaps the most significant Italian modernist novelist.” –The Times Literary Supplement

“[A] neglected masterpiece. Seventy-five years old, the novel feels entirely modern.” –The Boston Globe

“A reason for celebration. . . . If you have never read Svevo, do so as soon as you can. He is beautiful and important.” –New Statesman

“One of the indispensable 20th-century novels. . . . A revolutionary book, and arguably (in fact, probably) the finest of all Italian novels.” –Kirkus Reviews

“No one has done more to make modern Italian literature available in English than William Weaver. . . . [His new translation is] scrupulously accurate.” –Anniston Star

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375727760
• ISBN-13: 978-0375727764
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73,570 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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90 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Comic and Inventive Masterpiece, March 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Zeno's Conscience (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)

This book is so wonderfully inventive and the character of Zeno Cosini so lovably comic, that I often wonder why it's not more widely read and loved. It was first published in Italy as La coscienza di Zeno, and James Joyce, no less, championed its cause and helped the English translation come into being. Still, the English speaking world, for some unknown reason, continues to ignore this wonderful book.

The protagonist of the book, Zeno Cosini, is a man at odds with himself. Hilarious odds. He loves analysis, but hates his analyst. He's neurotic to the core, but his desire to rid himself of his neuroses seems to be superseded by his amazing, and very funny, ability to rationalize things away.

When Zeno's despised analyst encourages him to keep a journal (write a memoir), Zeno does so even though he is lazy and fools himself into believing exactly what it is he wants to believe. A passionate smoker, who passionately wants to quit (naturally, since this pits him against his own worst enemy, himself), he begins his journal by recounting his various attempts at quitting smoking.

For Zeno, the quitting is the thing. He doesn't care how many days he goes without smoking. He doesn't care how many times he's failed in his attempts to quit. What exhilarates him, is the feeling he gets when he smokes, what he tells himself, will be his last cigarette. The problem is, Zeno needs to feel that exhilararion again. And again. And the only way to feel it again, is to quit smoking again, which necessitates taking up smoking yet again. You get my drift.

Smoking isn't Zeno's only problem in this book. Far from it. As a man who needs to be perpetually backsliding, Zeno wavers between a law degree versus a chemistry degree, then decides to join his family's business instead. He pines for the beautiful Ada, but marries her homely sister, Augusta, instead, simply to prove to himself that Ada no longer tempts him. Naturally, he proves no such thing.

Svevo's writing, at least in this translation from the original Italian is elliptical and convoluted. Zeno will begin a sentence telling us he still loves Ada very much and then end it by saying he feels nothing for her at all. But it's not confusing. Not in the slightest. Zeno's contradictions and Svevo's convolutions make for high hilarity and a comic character that is both lovable and memorable. Italian was Svevo's third language (after the Trieste dialect and German) and some contend that his choppy style is due to this fact. I don't think so. I think he deliberately wrote this way for maximum comic effect. And it works. Beautifully.

Zeno Cosini is a liar. He lies both to himself and to others. His lies to his doctors are some of the most hilarious passages in the book. But even though he's a liar, Zeno Cosini is one very wise and wonderful man. By the time World War I is approaching, Zeno is an elderly man who seems to have found the recipe for inner peace and la dolce vita: "Sorrow," he says, "and love--life, in other words--cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt." Zeno Cosini may have lied to himself about the pain of life, but he never ran away from it. This is definitely a book everyone should read. It's a classic, not only of Italian, but of world, literature.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an 'Italian Proust'?, October 30, 2008

By 

Nin Chan "Nin Chan" (Toronto, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Zeno's Conscience: A Novel (Paperback)

Having just finished the novel, I have come to understand why the French lauded Svevo so, and why the Italians remained thoroughly ambivalent towards him until the mid 20th century. He is, in so many senses, a thoroughly French novelist- overly introspective, morally lacerated, solipsistic (in a Sartrean sense), morbidly self-conscious, brimming with weltschmerz, nauseatingly sensitive. This is, for all its supposed 'modernism' and invention, also a bit of an anachronism, a decadent novel of the highest order, one that belongs alongside the likes of Huysmans, Verlaine, Mallarme and other such lachrymose types. Yet, this has none of the rococo refinement of the symbolists and dandies- as many have said before me, the prose is often callous and awkward, a far cry from the mannered elegance of Lampedusa, Pavese, Moravia. Svevo is no cane-flailing aesthete, and his haphazard craftmanship adds to the off-balance strangeness of the book.

It is true that Zeno's Conscience is, on a cosmetic level, a very funny book, but the comedy (which is of an acerbic, bile-encrusted, jet-black sort, think Baudelaire, who is perhaps much closer to Svevo than any other writer I can think of) can hardly obscure the fact that this is one of the most disquieting books in existence. It has all the apocalyptic gravity of Hamsun's best work, all the soul-searing pathos/self-pity of "A Rebours", all the sulphurous savagery of Lautreamont, all the anguished desperation of Sade's finest work. Forget about the Joyce and Kafka comparisons- there is absolutely nothing affirmative about this book whatsoever. French literature is studded with world-weary types, but beneath the feverish execrations of Beckett and Celine (two writers who share Svevo's love for slapstick comedy) is a tortured love for humanity, an insuppressible faith in the value of existence. Be warned, for you will find little of this in "Zeno's Conscience". Its greatest achievement is its profound ambivalence- I am still unsure of whether I should laugh at zeno's imbecility or shudder at his unremitting rancor and resentment.

What, then, is there to recommend about this much-lauded novel? Simply put, this book encapsulates the 'Mal Du Siecle' better than almost any novel I can name. Yes, this book should be shelved next to "Sentimental Education", "The Red and Black", "A Rebours", "Notes From The Underground", "Death In Venice", "Flowers Of Evil" and "A Man Without Qualities" as one of the definitive documents of modernity. If Deleuze is correct in saying that literature is symptomatology, this novel diagnoses and elaborates upon a condition that we are still convalescing from. It is a novel of pure inwardness, gratuitous, effusive and excruciatingly frank. As a confession, it shares many traits with two illustrious forbears, the confessions of Rousseau and Augustine. Like the former, it is pregnant with effusive self-aggrandizement, affected sentiment and perverse rationality, like the latter it juxtaposes this with masochistic self-abasement and thoroughgoing pessimism. I cannot share the view that Zeno is an 'adorable' character- I find him diseased, the harbinger of (post)modern exhaustion and vacuity. It is known that Svevo could recite entire passages of Schopenhauer by heart--I believe that tells you more about what to expect from "Zeno's Conscience" than any review you could read. Svevo is, unwittingly, an oracle, and the book is an augury- it heralds the arrival of Nietzsche's Last Men, those who walk among us.

Beyond this, "Zeno's Conscience" is also an extraordinarily profound book about conversation. Indeed, the entire novel is about speech acts and the realities that they construct- Zeno spends much of the novel lamenting a lie that he cannot retract (and which subsequently engenders more and more lies, until he is deluged by a torrent of dishonesties) or pondering a torturously impenetrable sentence spoken by his beloved. Many of the guffaws in the novel are aroused by the multifarious snares that words create- Zeno's irrepressible mouth generates disaster upon disaster, and his haplessness before his hamartia is uncomfortably funny.

This is something he shares with Proust and Kafka, a fascination with the gesture and the spoken word. Like Proust, Zeno is obsessed with posture/imposture, simulation/dissimulation, social procedures and proprieties, awed by pomp and hauteur. Unlike Proust's narrator, though, he is hilariously inept at producing the appropriate signs for the occasion and utterly incapable of interpreting the signs of others.

For all the commonalities he shares with Proust, though, I can't help but feel as though the comparisons with the writer of the Recherche are absurdly injudicious. It is true that Svevo shares similar concerns with Proust- the instability of the Cogito, time and age, memory, the value of writing as a penitential/salvational exercise, the insatiability of desire, the incongruity of perception and fact, the utter inscrutability of other people, the fallacy of objectivism, etcetera. Yet this novel has little of Proust's tenderness, even less of his lovably mawkish lyricism and none of his bittersweet joy. Beyond this, Zeno cannot lay claim to the two characteristics that are more Proustian than any others- naivete and innocence. Instead, in its dismaying descriptions of fin-de-siecle burgher life and modern decadence, "Zeno's Conscience" is somewhat closer in ambition (though not in structure and scope) to Mann's "Buddenbrooks".

Also, it is quite strange that so many psychoanalysts fail to take Zeno at his word. It is clear that Svevo was thoroughly conversant with the theories of Freud, and this familarity is evident throughout the novel, as he lampoons the practice with abandon. This is one of the clearest messages throughout the novel- we might be sick and tired of ourselves, but psychoanalysis is certainly not the deliverance we're waiting for. Zeno is absolutely unwilling to trade his disease for Oedipus, and that unwavering honesty is one of the few things we can commend him for.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wise and funny novel from a largely unknown author., May 14, 2006

By 

dinadan26 "dinadan26" (Burwood, New South Wales Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Zeno's Conscience (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) (Paperback)

The confessions of Zeno is an amazingly insightful novel about the folly of humanity, our amazing capacity for self delusion and our lack of understanding of our place in the great drama that is life.

Zeno is an elderly merchant in Trieste before World War One, who owes his success and money more to inheritance than to ability, who approaching the end of his life consults with a psychiatrist to cure his long term debilitating illnesses. As an exercise his Freudian psychiatrist asks Zeno to write a journal reviewing the major events of his life.

These journals form the basis for the confessions of Zeno and reveal a weak and shallow man. Zeno is subject to self delusions, he is almost totally lacking in self control, he is a man who plays at business while living of his inheritance, a man who marries because he feels that it is required of him, with little consideration of love, a man who blunders through life with little empathy causing harm to all around him. Yet what makes this novel fascinating is the authors ability to make Zeno despite all of his faults and weaknesses a likable and understandable human being.

Overall, an amazing book from a largely forgotten master.