Zeno's Conscience
SynopsisPlot
This enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business or make sense of his private life.
Story
About this book
Zeno's Conscience, first published in Italian in the 1920s by Italo Svevo, takes the form of a written confession. Its narrator, Zeno Cosini, is an Italian businessman who has been asked by his psychiatrist to set down an account of his life. What follows is a long, winding, and frequently comic self-portrait shaped by Zeno's inability to see himself clearly.
Zeno describes his repeated and always unsuccessful campaigns to stop smoking, each attempt tied to a supposedly final cigarette. He recounts his pursuit of a woman named Ada, who does not return his interest, and his eventual marriage to her less striking sister Augusta, a union that turns out to be surprisingly contented. He also becomes involved with a young aspiring singer. Through these episodes, Zeno narrates his efforts to manage a family business he barely understands, stumbling from one situation to the next with earnest confusion.
The novel's structure mirrors the unreliability of its narrator. Zeno constantly reinterprets his own motives, and the gap between what he claims and what appears to have happened gives the book much of its energy. Svevo set the story in Trieste, a port city that at the time sat at the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
