Zeno's Conscience (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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. Most importantly, the very old man is still a fabulist, and his lies still have marvellous staying power. To save face in front of staid Valentino, he pretends he has concluded a business deal that he is then obligated to go out and conclude. As ever, his circumstances clash with his imaginings – and as ever, it is reality that ultimately gives way and transforms. 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.? Drama Shakespeare Other Drama Other Poetry Junior Classics Young Adult Classics Collections& Sets Unabridged

The five stories have some surprising twists. The story of his marriage is the best one - he begins visiting the house of a businessman he is fond of and discovers four daughters, all of whose names begin with "A" and all of whom have reputations for beauty. He promises himself that he will marry one of the beautiful daughters, but one turns out to be too young; one has "a squint" (which I take to mean strabismus); one wants a career instead of a husband; and the fourth one, the eligible one with whom he falls in love, can't stand him. He ends up with the exact sister he vowed never to take, and as soon as they are engaged, he is filled with unexpected happiness. They have a very satisfying marriage, at least in part because he tells her about everything (except the mistress) and she trusts him. Admittedly, by modern standards this is an odd marriage, but in comparison with the other marriages in the novel, it is companionable and mutually loving, and the reader has the feeling that if Augusta, Zeno's wife, withholds judgment, then the reader might as well do so, too.

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No, Zeno Cosini non può certo passare come un campione di istanze femministe. Neppure femminili tout court. All'inizio ci presenta il protagonista, questo uomo che non riesce mai a prendere una decisione e portarla avanti. Fa tutto per dispetto e percorre solamente la via più facile per ogni cosa. Insomma, un personaggio che ho odiato con tutto il cuore e che se lo avessi avuto nella mia vita, probabilmente lo avrei spellato vivo. 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 The story starts with the note of Doctor S; we read Zeno’s Conscience from his confessions. Zeno explains how he fell in love, how he did business, what he got angry with, his fight with quitting smoking, and many more unnecessary details. But I read it with great pleasure because this is one of those great books.

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.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. 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. He prizes his earlier journals because ‘the part of my life described there is the only part I have lived’. There is no Zeno outside of his own exercises in self-fashioning, but by the same token, he really is the person he at first only pretended to be. There is, he knows, no other way to become someone: the only thing to do with ‘horrid real life’ is to ‘literaturize’ it.

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. James Joyce, ο οποίος υπήρξε δάσκαλός του, προώθησε αυτό το βιβλίο, και γενικότερα οποιαδήποτε σύγκριση με τον μεγάλο Ιρλανδό. Το μόνο κοινό στοιχείο ανάμεσα σ’ αυτούς τους δύο ήταν τα πάθη τους: ο μεν Joyce heavy drinker, ο δε Svevo heavy smoker. Misunderstandings between people are funny because they suggest the great vanity of the self. In that Scottish anecdote, two sealed egoisms talk past each other: the master, thinking of himself, asks the servant if he has been tarnishing his reputation; the servant, also thinking of himself, replies with information about his own mental processes. If this is part of the reason the anecdote raises a smile, comedy would seem to be functioning here at its moral, corrective level, scuffing the shine on vanity and entrapping the diabolical self. This is the rather severe, Bergsonian idea of comedy as cleanser. 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. Catalogue Titles Authors Readers Unabridged Fiction Classic Fiction Modern Classics Contemporary FictionAt one point in the novel, Zeno tries to impress Ada by letting her know how much he has grieved over his father’s death. He goes on to suggest that if he had children he would try to make them love him less, so as to spare them suffering at his passing. Alberta says: ‘The surest method would be to kill them’– an excellent Svevian Witz. Ada then says that she thinks it wrong to spend one’s life only in preparation for death, to which Zeno forcefully replies: ‘I held my ground and asserted that death was the true organiser of life. I thought always of death, and therefore I had only one sorrow: the certainty of having to die.’ Hilarious. . . . Effortlessly inventive and eerily prescient. . . . William Weaver . . . updates the novelist’s idiosyncratic prose with great affection.”– The Atlantic Monthly Almost all of Svevo’s central characters resemble Zeno in leading double lives: lives of the imagination that contrast sharply with their lives at the office. In public, they are businessmen; in private, they are artists. ‘His official career was a quite subordinate post in an insurance society….His other career was literary’, Svevo writes of the protagonist of his second novel, As a Man Grows Older. In his gem of a novella, A Perfect Hoax, Mario is another aging writer with an office job who prides himself on the novel he wrote forty years prior. Still, Mario’s decades of inactivity are ‘full of dreams and void of any troublesome experience’, for he persists in regarding himself as ‘destined for glory’. It is this unflagging hope, so easily exploitable, that is the basis of the ‘perfect hoax’ of the title. When Mario’s malicious friend tells him that a major publisher wishes to reissue his book for the German-language market, he is eager to believe the lie.

In Zeno’s case, the same structure recurs. He sets his heart on marrying the beautiful Ada, with whom he is painfully in love, and when she rejects him, he asks for the hand of her equally beautiful sister, Alberta; when she, too, turns him down, he proposes to plain, kindly Augusta. She initially replies, ‘you’re joking’, but she is soon coaxed into accepting. The real joke is on Zeno, not only because he has to follow through with the wedding, but because the ensuing union is so improbably happy. Ada is right to remark, ‘never did a man who thought he was acting hastily behave more wisely than you’. The problem with Zeno is that he really had bad character flaws. He was very jealous, very conceited, a big baby, a hypochondriac, and very demanding. He falls in love with one woman, Ada, she rejects him, asks her sister Alberta, gets rejected, and settles with the third, Augusta. The fourth is a child so there was no more options. He maintains that he still loves Ada and even has an affair with another woman, Carla, just to prove... I am not sure. His love? His conceit? His womanizer abilities? 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 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. mai possibile che l’autore di questo capolavoro, che raggiunge altezza tale da consentire di accostarlo non solo alla massima letteratura nazionale ma anche a quella mondiale, possa scrivere di sé quanto segue?!:

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-11 01:44:30 Associated-names Weaver, William, 1923-2013 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA40327223 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier 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. Svevo’s masterpiece . . . [in] a fresh translation by the dean of Italian literary translators.”– Los Angeles Times 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. 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.