Confessions of Zeno     by Italo Svevo Original title: La coscienza di Zeno Original language: Italian Published by Vintage Books Pub. Date: 1989 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.77 x 7.98 x 5.22 ISBN: 0679722343 List Price: $14.00 Not available for ordering Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback Not available for ordering

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Zeno Cosini is an elderly businessman who turns to the new science of psychoanalysis to try to rid himself of a series of physical and mental ailments. His analyst makes him delve into his memory and write down his impressions of his past. Zeno accordingly begins the disjointed narration of the salient chapters of his life — his marriage, his father’s death, his business — and from this we see a pattern of perpetual failure emerging, the portrait of an inept man continually overtaken by events. His neurosis has influenced every moment of his life, denying him any ability to make decisions, turning him into an idle dreamer, a melancholic and mocking spectator of events, equipped with an ever-ready sense of irony. Zeno’s adversities lie at the heart of twentieth-century man’s crisis of values, his struggle for identity, and they leave their stamp on him as a total existential failure.

Written after a 25-year silence, The Confessions is the last of Svevo’s novels and certainly the richest in autobiographical

themes. Zeno’s irony illuminates the writer’s detachment from reality, a detachment exacerbated by the lack of recognition afforded Svevo, who only found fame towards the end of his life and then mainly abroad. The Italian public and critics honoured him only rather belatedly.

‘My father, like so many family men, was an adept in the art of least resistance. He was at peace with his family and with himself. He only read safe and moral books, not out of hypocrisy but from genuine conviction. I think he really believed in those sermons, and that it quieted his conscience to feel himself sincerely on the side of virtue. Now that I am getting old and beginning to approach the patriarchal state, I too feel that it is worse to preach immorality than to practise it. One may be driven to commit murder by love or hatred, but one can only advocate murder out of sheer wickedness.’ p36