Confessions of Zeno - Hardcover

Svevo, Italo; Schmitz, Ettore

3.77 out of 5 stars

28,267 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0837155371 ISBN 13: 9780837155371

Publisher: Greenwood Pub Group, 1930

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As a form of therapy, Zeno's doctor advises him to write his memoirs. The patient reconstructs the events in his life into a palatable reality founded upon compromise and rationalization.

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Review

The pliant protagonist of Italo Svevo's 1923 classic Confessions of Zeno is, among other things, a bumbling businessman, a guilt-ridden adulterer, and a hardcore nicotine addict. What Zeno Cosini most definitely is not is wordless. For the novel is in fact a dense and comically excruciating exercise in self-revelation, undertaken by the narrator as part of his psychoanalytic treatment. Zeno never finds a cure for his affliction, which seems to be a strain of continental angst. Yet his reflections remain as audacious as they are exhaustive--and, much of the time, masterfully absorbing.

As we soon discover, Zeno is a master is the convoluted rationalization. He concocts numerous reasons why his "last cigarette" needn't truly become his last; he strives endlessly to convince himself that he loves his wife; he tirelessly justifies an awkward affair, all the while vacillating between a paralysis of action and a lazy submission. "My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses," Zeno proclaims early on. (Later he backpedals even further, confessing that his "resolutions existed for their own sake and had no practical results whatever.") As a last-ditch tactic, he transmutes his disappointments into inevitabilities--an act of creative bookkeeping that becomes steadily creepier as the narrative unfolds.

There are times, to be sure, when Zeno seems to grasp that life isn't merely feints and games, that subterfuge and dark motivation aren't the whole of human transaction. Yet he always retreats back into his extravagant, consoling fantasies. Perhaps that's why Svevo's book still has the power to discomfit: Zeno's ingenious whitewashing of an indifferent world feels alarmingly like the fictions we tell ourselves on a daily basis. --Ben Guterson

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therapy, Zeno's doctor advises him to write his memoirs. The patient reconstructs the events in his life into a palatable reality founded upon compromise and rationalization.

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