Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience
Zeno's Conscience starts hilariously, eventually turns grim and even tragic, and goes on too long, but closes almost as hilariously as it began. The novel's last section is about Zeno’s psychoanalysis; the first section is about his many attempts to quit smoking after savoring "just one last" cigarette. Over the course of the book Zeno frequently reports making good resolutions, including making the one to quit smoking many, many times. He also decides to break with his mistress most every day over the course of a long affair. If he does not end up doing the opposite of what he sets out to do, he wanders off and does something or another completely irrelevant to his plans.
The novel sometimes feels formless and close to miscellaneous. However, there is some structure. I have already indicated that the book is framed by failed cures. Not as immediately obvious is that the long chapter "A business partnership" reverses the structure of the relationships in "The story of my marriage," another very long chapter.
Plot revelations ahead
Zeno is fascinated by four Malfenti sisters, all of whose name begin with "A" before he meets them. He falls in love with Ada, the most beautiful one. Although it is fairly obvious that she is in love with the dapper Guido, Zeno proposes marriage to Ada anyway. Immediately upon her refusal, he proposes to the young Alberta, who also refuses. Then he proposes to Augusta, the plain sister, and the one who is in love with him. All three proposals are made in rapid succession, in a time perhaps as short as half an hour!
Not surprisingly, Augusta turns out to be a very suitable and very devoted wife. Zeno believes that he is sufficiently discreet with his mistress for Augusta not to find out. I think this is another of his delusions, though there is nothing that establishes this for the reader. In contrast, Ada is very jealous of Guido’s mistress.
Over time, Guido loses a small fortune through bad investment. Zeno works in Guido’s office to have someplace to go, but his own inheritance is managed for him. Ada comes to depend upon Zeno more and more and to hate everything about Guido that once attracted her. From hating the Guido who is superior in abilities and who gets the girl he wants, Zeno comes to love Guido as he fails, as Ada loses her looks, etc.
Although both Ada and Augusta bear children, the children have practically no reality for Zeno. Within a few days of finishing reading the novel, I have forgotten their names and none of them is set off as an individual with characteristics of his or her own. Indeed, different brands of cigarettes are more individuated than the children are. Obviously, this lack of interest in his and Augusta's (or Guido and Ada's) offspring says much about Zeno's self-absorption.
The book’s place in modernist literature
Zeno's Conscience * first published in 1923, is the major Italian modernist novel. Although written in Italian, it came from and is set in Trieste, which was the Mediterranean port of the Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg) Empire until 1918. The society about which Zeno/Svevo wrote is much closer to that of Musil (or Kafka) than to that of Pirandello. Zeno, Guido, and the Malfentis are smug, provincial bourgeois members of the same senile empire about to collapse as that in (the even more endless!) Man Without Qualities.
Moreover, (like Kafka) Ettore Schmitz (the man who published under the name Italo Svevo) was an assimilated Jew. The population of Trieste was primarily Slavic at least by descent. Italian was the author's third language (and his book until now has been available in English, as The Confessions of Zeno* in an inaccurate and dated translation from the 1930s by Beryl De Zoete. The new translation is by the much-honored translator from Italian (of Calvino, among others), William Weaver.
Svevo’s early work (the most important of which was a novel titled Senilità (which is a cognate of "senility," though the novel’s translation in English (also by De Zoete and recently reissued) is titled As a Man Grows Older) was ignored, but his English tutor, James Joyce (who lived in Trieste both before and after World War I) liked it. Svevo read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and substantial parts of Ulysses in manuscript and is one of those upon whom the character of Bloom in the latter book is drawn.
After Joyce championed Zeno in English and French literary circles, it was eventually noticed in Italian ones, particularly championed by the great poet Eugenio Montale.
Although not making as many demands on readers as the masterworks of Proust or Joyce or Faulkner, Zeno's Conscience can strain patience (it strained this reader’s). Its overall design is not immediately clear and the unreliable narrator can be irritatingly fatuous and obtuse, though it is difficult not to feel considerable sympathy for him in his uncomprehending relationships.
Zeno has trouble recalling his dreams when he needs to produce them for his psychoanalyst (and starts inventing some), but his whole life – as he recalls it in what he writes for his psychoanalyst -- is something of a dream. In particular, it has a dream logic that he fails to understand. This applies even better to Guido. Zeno at least continues to land on his feet, however absurd their placement may be. His optimism really is invincible, even when World War I breaks out and separates him from his cafe latte.
The book is not a stream of consciousness through a specific short period of time, as in Joyce or Woolf or Faulkner, but is a representation of a particular consciousness in all its lumpy irrationality, unfolding in ways quite unlike the chronological narratives of 19th-century novels. Like Proust’s multi-volume novel or like Ulysses Zeno’s memoir skips over much and focuses in minute detail on formative moments. As the English biographer P. N. Furbank wrote, the nook approximates "the ideal of the ‘modern’ novel, a living web of connections, an inclusive form in which everything opens out into everything else," and, intricate in its ironies, it has "that permanent colour of novelty about it which places it with the great masterpieces of the modern novel."
For me Lampedusa's The Leopard (on which see my sadly neglected epinion at http://www.epinions.com/book-review-73F-72D5ED9-39FF676E-prod1) is the great Italian novel, and I am a passionate admirer of Christ Stopped at Eboli, but both are more realistic, less high modernist, than Svevo's masterpiece is.
*The Italian title is La Conscienza di Zeno. Conscienza means both "conscience" and "consciousness" in Italian. Either sense is at least somewhat ironic in that Zeno is patently unconscious of his motives and much else and his conscience is either stunted or easily satisfied with rationalizations that are obviously false to the reader.
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