Zeno's Conscience (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I close my eyes and I see immediately, pure and childish and ingenuous, my love for my mother, my respect and great fondness for my father . . . I had always cherished the hope of being able to relive one day of innocence and naïveté. For months and months that hope supported and animated me. Didn’t it mean producing through vital memory, in full winter the roses of May? And what of the man who produced this wonderfully funny and melancholy portrait? Italo Svevo was born Ettore Schmidt in 1861, a native of Trieste, that anomalous city: Italian, but part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the First World War, whose natives spoke a dialect incomprehensible to most other Italians. In 1905, Svevo needed to learn English to go on a business trip to London. In one of the most unlikely and curious of meetings he took as a tutor a young Irishman living in the city. This was the then unknown and penniless James Joyce. In between learning beginner’s English, Svevo talked to Joyce about literature: he revealed that he had published two novels at his own expense and Joyce came to admire his work greatly. When La coscienza di Zeno was published in 1923 Joyce worked hard and successfully to get it noticed. To judge by a caricature Joyce drew of his friend, Svevo also served as one of the models for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Svevo was a businessman, not a professional writer. Like Zeno, he had married into the family firm, which manufactured a type of marine paint repellent to barnacles. In business he was more successful than poor Zeno. And in his literary career? Well there is a residual snobbery in the literary world against anyone in ‘trade’. Novelists of the literary variety are inclined to think that their own fretful personalities are typical of humanity at large. They conceive most of their characters in their own or their friends’ image and cannot believe that an outwardly ordinary man, especially a businessman, could write a major modern novel. Svevo may have sold paint for a living, but he was also a consummate literary artist. Nobody else could have written Zeno, or any book remotely like it. By all accounts Svevo, whatever his private thoughts, was a kind and thoughtful man. After his death in a car accident in 1928 his widow Livia wrote a warm memoir of their life together. Svevo sounds superficially very like his hero – an inveterate smoker, a hypochondriac, fond of dogs and cats. But, of course, dear Zeno could never have summoned up the energy to write a book. Still it is his tale, and it is less like reading a novel than almost any other I know. It is more like listening to a warm and all too fallible friend’s amiable conversation, in which he gives away far more than he realizes.

Credo che sia comunque in buona compagnia, anche nell’olimpo degli scrittori: il primo che mi viene in mente è il grandioso Céline – direi che su questo aspetto possono andare a braccetto. Ma la compagnia è ben più nutrita.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.’ 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.

Perhaps the best-known part of the book is the first, short chapter in which Zeno chronicles his efforts to give up smoking and the many times in his life when he smokes his "last cigarette". Zeno then discusses his ambivalent relationship to his father and the heavy influence on his life of his father's death which occurred when Zeno was thirty. His businessman father left him a large inheritance to be managed by a long-time employee to prevent his son from squandering it. 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 Catalogue Titles Authors Readers Unabridged Fiction Classic Fiction Modern Classics Contemporary Fiction Several times I wondered about the man but then Zeno did something that I said, hold on. Maybe he isn’t so bad? In fact as the book carries on, Zeno himself changes and something “decent” comes out of him. 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?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. Read more Details 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: Comic contradiction tends to reproduce itself at several levels of possibility at once, and that is the case here. First, the servant, thinking that he is absolving himself of the crime of talking disrespectfully about his master, fails to realise that he is simultaneously convicting himself of the crime of thinking disrespectfully about his master. And second, by replying thus to his master, he is not keeping his thoughts to himself but unwittingly sharing them.

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.

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As we are told in the introduction to Emilio’s Carnival, Svevo himself was a model for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, and Svevo’s red-blonde-haired wife inspired the character Anna Livia Plurabelle in Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. After praise from Joyce, Svevo, who had given up writing, went on to write this book that some consider his masterpiece, Confessions of Zeno. (Others think Emilio’s Carnival is his best work.) Svevo was a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy. He wanted always to be a writer, but found himself pressured by family and financial necessity to take work in a bank. His brother Elio was his confidant and support, and believed absolutely in his literary talents: “No historian admired Napoleon as much as I admired Ettore,” Elio wrote in his diary, before his early death of nephritis at the age of twenty-three, in 1886. Without his brother’s support, Ettore continued to pursue his literary ambitions and, while still working in business, published his first novel, Una Vita, at his own expense, in 1892. (It is available in English as A Life, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and recently re-issued by Pushkin Press.) The novel is structured as a diary published by his doctor who was psychoanalyzing him. Zeno kept the account as part of his therapy. Much of the novel takes place in Trieste in northern Italy around the time of WW I. But he manages to convalesce only when he is forced to face the real life and becomes bold enough to use his willpower… 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.

Credo di averlo letto tre volte, una probabilmente anche per studi universitari. E questa la ricordo in particolare perché iniziò e finì durante le ore di lavoro come guardiano notturno di un campus americano di Firenze. that the inertia of his destiny was the cause of his misfortune. If, just once in his life, it had been his duty to untie or retie a rope; if the fate of a fishing boat, however small, had been entrusted to him, to his care, his energy; if he had been obliged to prevail over the howling of the wind and the sea with his own voice, he should be less weak, less unhappy. His memoirs then trace how he meets his wife. When he is starting to learn about the business world, he meets his future father-in-law Giovanni Malfenti, an intelligent and successful businessman, whom Zeno admires. Malfenti has four daughters, Ada, Augusta, Alberta, and Anna, and when Zeno meets them, he decides that he wants to court Ada because of her beauty and since Alberta is quite young, while he regards Augusta as too plain, and Anna is only a little girl. He is unsuccessful and the Malfentis think that he is actually trying to court Augusta, who had fallen in love with him. He soon meets his rival for Ada's love, who is Guido Speier. Guido speaks perfect Tuscan (while Zeno speaks the dialect of Trieste), is handsome, and has a full head of hair (compared with Zeno's bald head). That evening, while Guido and Zeno both visit the Malfentis, Zeno proposes to Ada and she rejects him for Guido. Zeno then proposes to Alberta, who is not interested in marrying, and he is rejected by her also. Finally, he proposes to Augusta (who knows that Zeno first proposed to the other two) and she accepts, because she loves him.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? BUT SVEVO FINALLY could not resist what he called his “literary demon,” and immediately after World War I he started work on what was to become La Coscienza di Zeno. A first draft was written in a matter of weeks in 1919, but the novel took three years and many drafts to complete. “He was surprised by the force of inspiration, which gave him no peace,” writes Livia. The book was published—once again, at his own expense—in 1923. Without Joyce’s intervention, it seems entirely possible that Zeno’s Conscience would have disappeared without a trace, in the manner of its predecessors; but with the assistance of his now-celebrated supporter Svevo found himself not only published but feted across Europe. In these last years, Svevo told an acquaintance: “Until last year I was the ... least ambitious man in the world.... Now I am overcome by ambition. I have become eager for praise. I now live only to manage my own glory. I went to Paris ... and all I could see was Italo Svevo....The ville lumiere ... seemed to exist only as a function of my glory.”