Zeno's Conscience (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Confessions are difficult to pull off, because, as Zeno himself says, "A confession in writing is always a lie", but a novel that takes the form of a confession doesn't have to be true, it only has to be alluring or intriguing, and Zeno's voice is both. His avowed motives are simple: to tell what happened and why. His actions don't speak well of Zeno. He is deceitful, lustful, envious, impulsive, lazy and easily distracted. But in fact, major sins like these are often acceptable to readers because they make for an interesting narrative. Zeno is honest and generous. He seems to be telling the truth, at least to himself and the reader, even if not to his wife and his friends. And even though he deceives his friends, he almost always speaks well of them. Such generosity in a narrator (who is simultaneously speaking ill of himself) is appealing. Confessions of Zeno moves between moral correction and tragic pathos, between the bracing spectacle of vanity and the sad prospect of an imprisoned self acting as if it were free. This prospect is made more acute by the way Svevo writes his novel: it is told in the first person, by Zeno Cosini, a Trieste businessman now in his late fifties, who has been asked by his psychoanalyst to write an account of his early life. Zeno is a hypochondriacal, neurotic, delightful, solipsistic, self-examining and self-serving bourgeois, a true blossom of the mal du siècle. The novel we are reading is supposed to constitute his memories. The middle-aged Zeno recalls his student days; his lamentable and very funny attempts to give up smoking (which he considers the key to his insomnia, his fevers, his muscle pains); his father’s death (in which the old man raises his hand and collapses at the very same moment, thus accidentally striking Zeno on the cheek as he dies); his farcical attempt to marry one of the many Malfenti sisters (naturally he marries the one he at first found ugliest); and his adventures in business (Zeno is a terrible businessman who accidentally does very well). Zeno dice (e come dargli torto) che la vita attuale è inquinata alle radici (basta vedere tutti gli alberi che vengono giù a Roma sulla testa dei passanti): comprenderlo vuol dire essere sano. E quindi, se Zeno capisce d’essere sano, perché mai dovrebbe farsi curare dal dottor S.?

Trieste, in its diversity and cosmopolitanism, is a main character in Svevo's book. The main human character is one Zeno Cosini, a businessman and sometimes idler in Trieste. The elderly Zeno has been undergoing psychoanalysis and has prepared his memoirs at the behest of the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has released the memoirs to the public in a fit of pique at Zeno for leaving therapy. The purported memoirs form the bulk of the novel, with the exception of the concluding chapter. I felt a shudder run through me at the vision of all that acid, but immediately afterwards I had a somewhat happier vision of life: I didn’t like lemons, but if they were to give me the liberty to do what I should do or wanted to do without suffering harm, freeing me from every other restraint, I would consume those countless lemons myself. Complete freedom consists of being able to do what you like, provided you also do something you like less. True slavery is being condemned to abstinence: Tantalus, not Hercules. Ma chi è davvero pratico di sofferenza è anche un buon frequentatore, e utilizzatore (finale e iniziale), dell’ironia. Zeno is not that old; 57 in 1913 when he first consults the analyst. But he has always been a hypochondriac and has felt older than his years for a long time. Psychoanalysis is simply the latest thing he has taken up. (He has even bought a book on the subject, commenting ‘It’s not hard to understand, but it’s very boring.’) It fails him, but he does embark at the analyst’s behest on an account of his life as a younger man, producing what Paul Bailey has called a ‘profoundly comic study of a man whose greatest strength is his inability to act strongly’. Zeno is a marvellously comic character because he is an ordinary man who believes himself capable of great things if only circumstances would not constantly conspire to thwart him. Solo che Guido si rivela ben più inetto del presunto inetto Zeno, perde soldi tanto da essere spinto a simulare un suicidio per spingere la moglie ad aiutarlo economicamente. Suicidio simulato che invece riesce benissimo, l'uomo ci lascia le penne.

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But Zeno would be easy to read were he merely reliably unreliable: he would be a hypocrite and a fool. (He is a hypocrite, but only fitfully.) Svevo wonderfully modifies the technique of unreliable narration, in two ways, and it is this that deepens the novel’s comedy. First, Zeno is really trying to be truthful about himself, and sometimes he succeeds. He does see his memoirs as confessions of a kind. His description of the chaos of his courtship contains this accurate self-observation: ‘For all my efforts I achieved the result of that marksman who hit the bullseye, but of the target next to his.’ He tells us, in this passage, of the way he tries to woo Ada, whom he selects for her beauty and her seriousness. ‘So I set out to win Ada and I continued my efforts to make her laugh at me, at my expense, forgetting that I had chosen her because of her seriousness. I am a bit eccentric, but to her I must have seemed downright unbalanced.’ Zeno es un personaje ridículo, hasta charlotiano en ocasiones, un enorme egoísta, caprichoso, incapaz de reprimir sus impulsos (y esto no siempre en su beneficio) ni de asumir responsabilidades, falto de voluntad para cualquier propósito puede ser muy cruel con los que le quieren, no hay más que ver la brutalidad con la que se relaciona sexualmente con Carla. Svevo's subject is the weakness of the will, or abulia, and how a dreamy nature has little chance up against the temptations set out by the amazing and obdurate reality of life. In "Zeno's Conscience," Zeno Cosini, an unexceptional Trieste businessman, pits his will against the enslaving habit of smoking, the complexities of courtship, the delights of philandery, the discipline required by business, and loses every time, yet cannot quite be said to go down in defeat. Of course, it is not Ada but Augusta whom he marries, after a series of darkly comic errors. Ada—whom Zeno protests hollowly to have renounced for the remainder of the novel, while frequently revealing through his actions that his passion still burns—marries the dapper Guido Speier, who can play the violin beautifully, who “spoke Tuscan fluently, while Ada and I were condemned to our horrid dialect,” and who sports a fine head of hair, in painful contrast to Zeno, who comments that “a good deal of my head had been invaded by my brow.” Guido is his second self, his alter ego: the man of action to Zeno’s man of thought, the supposed success to Zeno’s failure (in business, in art, in sex). Guido will prove ultimately the less solid and resilient of the two, a gambler and a weakling. But this does not stop Zeno from hating him, and even from fantasizing about killing him.

Il cognato Guido gli ha portato via la sorella Malfenti che Zeno aveva puntato per prima: per questo meriterebbe odio e disprezzo eterni. La sorte, invece, spinge Guido a chiedere aiuto proprio a Zeno, e a chiederglielo proprio in quell’ambito nel quale Zeno è sempre stato considerato inetto da suo padre, gli affari. Zeno has an affair and he manages to develop a relationship where, when he is with his mistress, he wishes he were with his wife, and vice-versa. No acabé la novela con mucho entusiasmo, por mucho que me hiciera saber, a modo de la magdalena de Proust, todo lo que puede dar de sí una cajetilla de tabaco, al menos una de esas que ya no se fabrican y que llevaban gravada el sello del águila imperial. La lectura es interesante, nada aburrida, pero yo no he sabido conectar con ella como seguramente se merece. Another lengthy chapter of the book describes Zeno's relationship with a young man, Guido, who has courted and won the sister whom Zeno had wished to marry. The story involves wheeling and dealing and much emotional and financial turmoil. The only time in my life – so far – when I was taken to see a psychiatrist, I was 11. I remember little about the occasion. My mother and I sat facing a large man behind a large desk. I can’t see his face now, only the grey light reflected on his glasses, the lenses of which were perfectly flat, like stage glasses. He asked my mother questions but I don’t think he spoke to me at all. There was no couch. I was perched in an enormous armchair. A succession of specialists had been investigating some mysterious ailments, prodding and dosing me but reaching no specific conclusion. The psychiatrist was, I presume, the last resort, to see if it was ‘all in the mind’, as they used to say.An] exhilarating and utterly original novel. . . . Weaver’s version strikes one as excellent.”–P. N. Furbank, Literary Review Rather surprisingly, the marriage turns out happily, partly due to the forbearance of his new wife and partly to Zeno’s endless capacity to see himself always in a good light: ‘I discovered I had not been a blind fool manipulated by others, but a very clever man.’ This very clever man has other things to worry about: the irritating reluctance of his father-in-law and his business partners to give him responsibility for anything important or to act on his advice. Indeed, he later goes into partnership with Guido Speier, the man to whom he lost Ada, and one who has an even worse business brain than Zeno. But for now, recently married, life for Zeno is pretty slow. His hypochondria constantly throws up new pains and ailments to torture him, but it cannot be counted a full-time occupation. With little to do, he grows bored. He reads. He plays the violin badly. He whiles away hours in the city’s elegant cafés. Almost inevitably, as an ‘adventure’, he considers taking a mistress. He chooses a young woman, Carla, an unsuccessful singer to whom he has given some financial help to further her career. Being Zeno, he suffers agonies of guilt at the very outset. Sitting at the breakfast table, facing Augusta, he thinks of Carla: Published in Italy in 1923 when Svevo was 62 years old. It tells the perspective of aging Zeno who has numerous issues at hand. He tries to give up smoking, tries to deal with his father’s death, talks most unflattering about his marriage and his mistress and the sad business venture with his brother in law. All ending up with psychoanalysis. In short an autobiography. 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 Proust» θα έπρεπε να με προϊδεάσει (μαντέψτε ποια δεν είναι φαν του), αλλά οι Αντίποδες με τις γενικά ενδιαφέρουσες επιλογές τους και τα ωραία τους εξώφυλλα με παρέσυραν.

Se è stato malato, Zeno ne ha approfittato per acuire lo sguardo e andare più lontano con gli occhi della mente. Paradossalmente, sentirsi sani è una certezza dalla quale è meglio guarire ammalandosi.

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Now the book has the oddest start. The doctor that helps Zeno with psychoanalysis, writes the Preface. He publishes the autobiography in revenge so that our dear Zeno can realize the lies and truths he has written about. Except Zeno notes that everyone lies, especially him. It’s true. Is it all a lie? Tre letture sempre accompagnate da numerose risate: si tratta di un romanzo molto molto divertente. Just like Ada in Zeno, this Angel is a fiction—the untruthful fantasy of a narcissistic soul. So bound up is Emilio with this fantasy life that he fails to notice the disintegration of his sister Amalia, whose unrequited love for Balli runs alongside Emilio’s passion. Amalia’s love is so repressed, however, that she can indulge it only while dreaming, and Emilio overhears her speaking to her beloved while she sleeps. The cost of this thwarted love will be Amalia’s life. 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. Zeno is a good-hearted comic anti-hero. Everything works against him and just about everything he does to improve himself makes things worse. “I have, and have always had, a strong impulse to become better; this is perhaps my greatest misfortune.”

Insomma, un personaggio che ho odiato con tutto il cuore e che se lo avessi avuto nella mia vita, probabilmente lo avrei spellato vivo. Write one must; what one needn’t do is publish,’ he was fond of saying. By 1902, he was writing that ‘the ridiculous, damnable thing called literature has now been quite definitely cut out of my life.’ He took up the violin (never playing very well, though possibly better than Zeno), and said that it ‘saved him from literature’. Over these years, he assumed greater responsibility at the Veneziani firm, overseeing the building of a factory in South-East London, in Charlton. From 1903 until the outbreak of war, Svevo spent a month or two every year in a rented house in Charlton – one of those comic dissymmetries worthy of Schopenhauer in Wimbledon and Kropotkin in Brighton. Typically, he made no attempt to befriend writers or intellectuals in London – and besides, his English was poor – preferring the inky, subaltern routines of ‘mournful/Ever weeping’ Charlton: the Sunday papers, library books, bottled beer and a place in a local string quartet.The original English translation was published under the title Confessions of Zeno. 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 Conscienceis a miracle of psychological realism. It’s other claim to fame is that James Joyce loved this book. Svevo knew Joyce when Joyce lived in Trieste, where the book takes place. He even gave Svevo an unfinished copy of Dubliners to proof. Perhaps there is a little of a Joycean literature in the character of Zeno?