By: Italo Svevo Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 432 Publication Date: June 18, 1989 Release Date: June 18, 1989
Product Description: As a form of therapy, Zeno's doctor advises him to write his memoirs. The patient reconstructs the events in his life into a palatable reality founded upon compromise and rationalization.
Amazon.com Review: The pliant protagonist of Italo Svevo's 1923 classic Confessions of Zeno is, among other things, a bumbling businessman, a guilt-ridden adulterer, and a hardcore nicotine addict. What Zeno Cosini most definitely is not is wordless. For the novel is in fact a dense and comically excruciating exercise in self-revelation, undertaken by the narrator as part of his psychoanalytic treatment. Zeno never finds a cure for his affliction, which seems to be a strain of continental angst. Yet his reflections remain as audacious as they are exhaustive--and, much of the time, masterfully absorbing.
As we soon discover, Zeno is a master is the convoluted rationalization. He concocts numerous reasons why his "last cigarette" needn't truly become his last; he strives endlessly to convince himself that he loves his wife; he tirelessly justifies an awkward affair, all the while vacillating between a paralysis of action and a lazy submission. "My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses," Zeno proclaims early on. (Later he backpedals even further, confessing that his "resolutions existed for their own sake and had no practical results whatever.") As a last-ditch tactic, he transmutes his disappointments into inevitabilities--an act of creative bookkeeping that becomes steadily creepier as the narrative unfolds.
There are times, to be sure, when Zeno seems to grasp that life isn't merely feints and games, that subterfuge and dark motivation aren't the whole of human transaction. Yet he always retreats back into his extravagant, consoling fantasies. Perhaps that's why Svevo's book still has the power to discomfit: Zeno's ingenious whitewashing of an indifferent world feels alarmingly like the fictions we tell ourselves on a daily basis. --Ben Guterson
The Last Good Cigarette With apologies to James Crumley, may the dude rest in peace. Funny peculiar at any rate that William Weaver saw fit to translate this great novel into English again. What can he have been thinking? He even writes a translator's introduction which contains not just vapid claptrap but the worst sort of special bleeding pleading to boot. The actual words in this instance are in fact the very least of it as it turns out. I've read Beryl de Zoete's resplendent 1930 translation of these Confessions upwards of a dozen times now but Weaver's superfluous new treatment just the once. Even his title seems blunt and ill-considered. Inexplicable I repeat that this is the book Mister Weaver might have chosen to update in the first place but there you go. An acquired taste for Triestan dialect notwithstanding tone is of the essence here and as I've said I've read and re-read Beryl de Zoete and William Weaver is no Beryl de Zoete. Deaf as a post he is in fact, in terms of tone. If a translation of one of the funniest novels of the early twentieth century should read simply like a mere translation well what in the blue blazes then is the real point of Weaver's clerical enterprise? There probably was only ever going to be one good shot at Svevo in English, and that was accomplished to almost everyone's satisfaction well over seventy years ago by a dame named Beryl. Anyway you don't just translate this type of language into plain new English but then William might not have known that. Sigh I say in any case. Read Mister Weaver if you must, the curiously lifeless words at least will bring you in fits and starts something of the plot, but choose rather de Zoete for the consummate rendering of Italo Svevo's richly rounded and subtly formal comedy in this outstandingly funny and affecting novel. The unforgettable Zeno Cosini. It's impossible really he won't crack you up six ways from Sunday. The five stars here are I needn't add all for Beryl de Zoete (1879-1962), bless her heart and her head. Though he's a fictional character and all, ditto that blessing upon the heart, head and perhaps maybe even the liver too of the equally unforgettable C.W. Sugrue.
Probably dated. The Confessions of Zeno
Not much happens in this book, nothing that interested me. The plot is conventional to the point of being dull. Conventional plots can be remarkable if done well: they can be entertaining. This was so mundane it made *my* life seem extraordinary; if this is what the author meant, then he succeeded. The humor was so underplayed -overpowered by the boring plot- one almost misses it completely. I agree that the protagonist is self absorbed but not self absorbed enough, not enough to make him either funny, a scoundrel, psychologically (too bad for this part of the book's plot premise) fascinating, or at least charming, and this is the problem with the rest of the novel: it doesn't go far enough to evoke anything (or hardly anything but ennui) in the reader; emotions, thoughts, laughter, or even insights (and I speak for myself). Characters like these *can* be epic, bigger than life, even immortal, as Dostoevsky's man from Notes From Underground, but Zeno is purely insipid. The book didn't evoke any feeling toward Zeno from me except indifference; I just couldn't care for the guy, and was quite frustrated with the tedious character and story. The dialogue was flat. The style of the book is dated -I gave it one star for basic technical achievement. I won't even go into the other characters in the book. This book suffers from what most "innovative" books of that time period suffer -TIME and hype. If you truly want to see innovation in language, characterization, plot, not to mention damn good entertainment, I refer you to Dostoevsky's aforementioned book, Celine's Journey to the End of Night, Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Genet's Our Lady Of The Flowers, Knut Hamsun's The Hunger, and/or John Fante's Road To Los Angeles. If you don't like modern, innovative literature then stick with Zeno. I didn't hate the book, but I believe there are better written and entertaining ones out there.
Why is this a Great Novel? Important, influential critics, such as V.S. Prtichett, Martin Seymour-Smith and James Woods have declared that "Zeno's Conscience," (formerly published as "The Confessions of Zeno") is not merely one of the best Italian novels of the last century, but one of the best novels of the last century period. A reader looking at this book may wonder why. On the face of it this book provides a comic account of a prosperous Triestan businessman, Zeno Cosini. It starts with his discussion of his inability to quit smoking, an inability fatally flawed by his lack of any desire to do so. We then face a discussion of his relationship with his father and his father's death. We hear about Zeno's courtship and his marriage, how he conducted an adulterous affiar, and how he saw his wife's brother-in-law ruin his business. Overall, these accounts are amusing. Certainly they are filled with the stuff of traditional comedy. Zeno tries to marry one attractive sister, proposes to a second one, and marries the third, plainest one--with whom he is very happy. He carries on a relationship with a would be vocalist who had the most musical voice--but can't really sing. We learn of how this relationship failed because his mistress thought his beautiful sister-in-law was actually his wife. But what makes this novel so superior to to other comic novels? What makes this better than Kingsley Amis, or Neil Simon?
Well it's easy to point out negative factors, since Svevo is not as sentimental or crude as Simon. Although Svevo went out of his way to write in a more everyday style than the more refined cast of contemporary Italian literature, his book flows much better than Amis' awkward contortions. And Zeno is obviously more complex and better characterized than Amis' autobiographical, whining self-pitying protagonists. Instead Svevo presents a deep, rich, subtle psychology for his protagonist. This in itself distinguishes him from Waugh and Catch-22. There have been other pioneers in 20th century fiction, but instead of the complex modernist techniques of Woolf, Joyce, Proust and Kafka, Svevo presents his as a comedy. But it is no idiosyncracy that Joyce encountered Svevo and did so much to ensure his discovery. Although the framing story of the book is Cosini's displeasure with his psychoanalyst, Svevo's account of Cosini's reactions, delays, excuses, subterfuges, and endless rationalizations does resemble the paradoxical nature of Freud at his best. Its use of comic paradox is reminiscent of another contemporary assimilated Jewish writer, Kafka (whom Svevo almost certainly never read). One can only give a few examples. There is of course, the countless notations Svevo makes of his final cigarette. At one point Zeno's father jokes that Zeno is crazy. So Zeno goes and decides to get as a joke an official certificate of sanity. This only leads his father to believe he really is crazy. (Later Zeno's youngest sister-in-law agrees). Zeno comments on how his father read ponderous moralistic works; now that he is older he is inclined to accept his practice: "One may be driven to commit murder by love or hatred, but one can only advocate murder out of sheer wickedness." Later we see the excruciating dilemma where Zeno rages at the doctor who can keep his father alive when he will not recover from the stroke he has had. We see the multiple lies Zeno concocts arounds himself as he covers up an assignation with a visit to a dying acquaintance. And so Svevo's account goes on, and takes a darker tone in its final pages as Zeno finds himself in the middle of World War One, and ends up speculating about the final extinction of humanity.
Literary masterpiece, with a 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 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-centered, and hypocritical. When we say "business relationship", we 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 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. At the end of the book, the book's full effect dawns on us, and we finally understand the psychologist perfectly. The ending is quite subtle, and this reviewer was shocked enough to need 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.
Over-analytical Ever feel like chucking your career, and following your true calling as a psychologist? Then you may be one of the select few who will find pleasure in this book. Every event that transpires, every word that is uttered, every facial expression, must be dissected by the narrator, to the point where the plotting dissolves into mush. There are those, I see, who managed to find humor in the endless babble. But I recommend this book to you, reader, only if you are very, very patient.
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