Zeno's Conscience (Penguin Modern Classics)

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An] exhilarating and utterly original novel. . . . Weaver’s version strikes one as excellent.”–P. N. Furbank, Literary Review With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed "last cigarette!" (Zeno's famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) Encapsulated in this dance of resolution and resignation are many of the novel’s, and the novelist’s, themes. Zeno Cosini is a modern antihero, the bourgeois nephew of Dostoevsky’s nameless narrator of Notes from Underground—seething, oppressed, suffering, but with a veneer of manners and social pretension, and a comical haplessness. In his supposed search for health, Zeno is in the process of psychoanalyzing himself: this is the novel’s premise. Psychoanalysis is perhaps the ultimate bourgeois luxury, and the very notion of an illness that requires analysis is an indulgence. In short, the ailments of the malade imaginaire are the diseases of the rich. In her delightful memoir of their life together, Svevo’s wife, Livia Veneziani Svevo, recalls a man who sounds not unlike Zeno Cosini. Svevo was large-headed, deep-browed (he went bald early), dark, with kind, extruding eyes. He was charming, insomniac and neurotic, prey to psychosomatic twinges and spasms. During their courtship, Livia says, Svevo anxiously warned her: ‘Remember that a single ill-chosen word would be the end of everything.’ Like Zeno, he was an incessant smoker, and spent his days in a cloud of ‘last cigarettes’ and collapsing resolutions. Numerologically superstitious, he often decided to smoke his last cigarette at seven minutes past four, the time at which his mother had died. ‘Perhaps by smoking,’ Livia writes, ‘he tried to quieten the “frogs”, which was what he called the insistent doubts that tormented him.’ Zeno is teased for his absent-mindedness by his competitor and future brother-in-law, Guido Speier; by his wife’s account, Svevo was astoundingly absent-minded, quite capable of putting on two sets of cufflinks and not noticing until the strange weight at his wrists alerted him. She tells a story in which her husband left the house with 150 lire to buy something needed at the Veneziani factory, and returned hours later without the object, but with a box of sweets and 160 lire in his wallet.

Il gioco (di incastri, rimandi, specchi, situazioni, equivoci, voci, doppi…) la fa da padrone tra queste pagine.Svevo’s temperament has affinities with Chekhov’s: a gentle voyeurism which perhaps masked an intense sensitivity to human and animal suffering; an unwillingness to act or think like an ‘intellectual’, combined with an aversion to the high-flown, the poetic (‘Why so many words for such few ideas?’ Svevo said of poetry); a hostility to religion; and an eye for the subtly comic. He was devoted to Witze, witty paradoxes and contradictions. When Joyce told him reprovingly that he never used coarse language but only wrote it, Svevo commented: ‘It would appear then that his works are not ones that could be read in his own presence.’ Confessions of Zeno is full of such Witze, large and small: Zeno’s mistress is pursuing a singing career despite her terrible voice; Zeno lectures Guido on playing the violin despite his own thin talents; there is the concept of the last cigarette and the certificate of sanity. The Witz can be found even in something as small as Zeno’s description of his baldness (one of my favourite details): ‘a great part of my own head had been usurped by my forehead.’ The most celebrated Witz occurred as Svevo lay on his deathbed. Seeing his nephew smoking, he feebly asked for a cigarette, was refused, and then murmured: ‘Now that really would have been the last cigarette.’ political correct), μέχρι το γάμο του με την ασχημούλα Αυγούστα, την εξωσυγική του σχέση, τις αμφιθυμικές του σχέσεις με τουν κουνιάδο του τον Γκουίντο, τις επιχειρηματικές του δραστηριότητες και φυσικά διάσπαρτοι από δω κι από κει οι αληθινοί και φανταστικοί του πόνοι. One of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. . . . [Svevo is] perhaps the most significant Italian modernist novelist.”– The Times Literary Supplement 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. That information, that I was her first lover, a designation implying a possible second one, did not move me greatly. … Softly I murmured in her ear : “You’re my first lover…since my marriage.”

The problem with his "last cigarette" starts when he is twenty. He contracts a fever and his doctor tells him that to heal he must abstain from smoking. He decides smoking is bad for him and smokes his "last cigarette" so he can quit. However, this is not his last and he soon becomes plagued with "last cigarettes." He attempts to quit on days of important events in his life and soon obsessively attempts to quit on the basis of the harmony in the numbers of dates. Each time, the cigarette fails to truly be the last. He goes to doctors and asks friends to help him give up the habit, but to no avail. He even commits himself into a clinic, but escapes. The whole theme, while objectively serious, is often treated in a humorous way.With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed “last cigarette!” (Zeno’s famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) 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 is like this fly: he is tormented by both reality and imagination. He is beaten, he is in the blind alley, he feels ill, he fills moribund, he suffers from hypochondria so he decides that he must be healed with psychoanalysis.

A] neglected masterpiece. Seventy-five years old, the novel feels entirely modern.”– The Boston Globe 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. The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

The tutor was none other than James Joyce, and his circle was soon hailing Zeno’s creator as ‘the Italian Proust’. At last, Schmitz and Svevo converged. Until his death in 1928, Svevo watched his pseudonym subsume his humdrum identity. In exactly the sort of jolting twist that occurs so often in his novels, the old man’s fantasies crystallized into fact. 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. 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. 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. Zeno first writes about his cigarette addiction and cites the first times he smoked. In his first few paragraphs, he remembers his life as a child. One of his friends bought cigarettes for his brother and him. Soon, he steals money from his father to buy tobacco, but finally decides not to do this out of shame. Eventually, he starts to smoke his father's half-smoked cigars instead.