Zeno's Conscience: A Novel

The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent book "The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity" led me to Italo Svevo's modernist novel of 1923, "Zeno's Conscience". Appiah's book examines various concepts of personal identity that shape individuals' views of themselves and others, including religion, country, color, class, and culture. Appiah argues that individuals tend to take a too narrow, rigid view of their identities and urges the rethinking and broadening of identity concepts with the words of the Roman dramatist Terrence as a guide: "nothing human is foreign to me".Appiah's study discusses Svevo and his novel "Zeno's Conscience" at length and with high praise. Raised as a Jew, a convert, to please his wife, to Catholicism, and with ties to many nations and languages. Svevo developed, in Appiah's account, a cosmopolitanism and an openness to shared identity that appears to be a model for Appiah's own views. In one of many passages in his book discussing "Zeno's Conscience", Appiah writes."Although he once referred to Trieste as a crogiolo assimilatore -- an assimilating crucible, or melting pot -- Svevo knew how much remained unmelted. His Zeno is, above all, a walker in the city, a boulevardier and rambler, moving from one neighborhood to another. He is also a man always struggling with his own irresolution, always smoking his 'last cigarette', always betraying his ideals, and forever scrutinizing his own prejudices and preferences like a quizzical ethnographer. He wants to confront uncomfortable truths -- to side with reality, however much it stings." (Appiah, p. 86)Appiah's praise brought me to this book and also helped me with its difficulties and ambiguities. Svevo was born Aron Ettore Schmitz and took the pen name Italo Svevo to combine the Italian and Swabian parts of his background. His novel is set in Trieste in the years leading up to WW I. Located in northern Italy on the Baltic Sea, Trieste was an important commercial center and port. Trieste has always been a cosmopolitan city with broad diversity and varying rulers. At the time covered in this novel Trieste was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire but enjoyed substantial local autonomy. People in Trieste had developed their own language, Triestene, a dialect of Italian.Trieste, in its diversity and cosmopolitanism, is a main character in Svevo's book. The main human character is one Zeno Cosini, a businessman and sometimes idler in Trieste. The elderly Zeno has been undergoing psychoanalysis and has prepared his memoirs at the behest of the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has released the memoirs to the public in a fit of pique at Zeno for leaving therapy. The purported memoirs form the bulk of the novel, with the exception of the concluding chapter.Zeno speaks in the first person of important events in his life. He is a highly neurotic, vacillating individual pulled, as are most people, between impulses and ideals. Zeno's memoirs discuss aspects of his life in great detail and with sometimes questionable accuracy. He is highly self-centered and alternates between tones of self-justification and folly. The tone moves between humor, irony, and seriousness. The book is organized more by incidents and themes in Zeno's life than by strict chronology -- the themes overlap.Perhaps the best-known part of the book is the first, short chapter in which Zeno chronicles his efforts to give up smoking and the many times in his life when he smokes his "last cigarette". Zeno then discusses his ambivalent relationship to his father and the heavy influence on his life of his father's death which occurred when Zeno was thirty. His businessman father left him a large inheritance to be managed by a long-time employee to prevent his son from squandering it.In the longest sections of the book, Zeno discusses his peculiar courtship of three young women whose names begin with "A" and who are daughters of a wealthy, flamboyant businessman whom Zeno has befriended. Zeno is rejected by two girls and accepted by the third who is physically less attractive than her sisters. Zeno proves an unfaithful husband, and he gives much attention to his affair with a young, poor would-be singer, Carla. The long relationship with Carla would not be Zeno's only infidelity. Still, the marriage endures and becomes a source of meaning for Zeno.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.The novel includes a great deal of detail and tension as Zeno moves from the frequently sordid, foolish actions of his life through his ideals to gain eventually a degree of peace. Among the many ambivalences of the book is Zeno's attitude to psychoanalysis -- he is ultimately able to jettison his therapy. The novel has many small scenes that develop its large themes including a pivotal scene with spiritualism and a Ouija board and many scenes and characters showing the love of music. I thought one of the finest moments of the work was a scene in which Carla at last breaks off the affair with Zeno in favor of marriage to her voice teacher. As Zeno leaves her residence, he hears the teacher playing Schubert's song "Abschied" -- "Farewell" on the piano he has purchased for the young woman in the arrangement by Liszt. It is an apt moment and choice and made me revisit the beautiful song I have known for a long time.The novel has the themes that Appiah found in the book and it deserves the praise he heaped on it. It offers a portrait of a fascinating city and of a troubled individual who ultimately learns to live and enjoy life and carry on. I was grateful for the opportunity to get to know this classic, modernistic novel.Robin Friedman

This is a very odd -- and sad -- little book. I found it when looking up authors to read while on a trip to Italy, and I confess I was almost totally unaware of Svevo's reputation as a twentieth century master. The buzz about this book is that it's the equal of Joyce and Proust, and while the text DOES seem strikingly modern, and while I can appreciate its originality especially for its time and in its representation of consciousness, I'm afraid I cannot actually say I liked very much (certainly nowhere NEARLY as much as Joyce, Proust, or Musil). Indeed, I found it to be quite tedious for most of its length. It may be a reflection of the fact that I was reading this during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Confirmation hearing, but somehow, this record of a self-deluded (and not very nice) person justifying ad nauseam the fact that he's cheating on his wife with his mistress just didn't strike me as funny. The narrator is a VERY complicated mixture of narcissism and self-delusion who continuously challenges the reader's perceptions, and while I can admire this as an achievement, it doesn't make for a book that's a great deal of fun to spend much time with.

When reading this book I could not help thinking "will I become a character in a Thomas Bernhard novel?". Would simply reading in the first person an account of a wildly off kilter person somehow make me a just a little bit crazy?Italo Svevo's Zeno Cosini is such an odd, interesting, self obsessed character. He is completely oblivious to his own awkwardness. He is a big square peg that thinks he's fitting into a round hole worold when it is completely and utterly untrue. The genius in the writing is that it all comes from Zeno's perspective and still we can gather from the reactions and dialogue with his friends and family, particularly his in-laws that he's more than a strange bird. The writing is so intense that one might feel we're a little too close to Zeno's strange logic and easy self deceptions.Zeno is not a very good guy. In fact in many ways he is entirely unlikeable. But at the same time so much of what he's thinking has a hint or ring of truth that left me frequently uncomfortable.And then there are points of almost burst out loud hilarity. After a competitor for the hand of one of lovely women that he's obsessed with has completed a stirring violin solo at the Malfenti household it is Zeno that breaks the silence and crushes the moment with an obtuse technical question on how Guido played that last several notes. It was the classic Woody Allen or Larry David perfectly mistimed and inappropriate line that draws raging stares and leaves Zeno perplexed that his wit and intelligence were not fully welcome and appreciated. There are so many of these finely timed or ill-timed treats where Zeno has either lied, exaggerated or interjected. Depending on reaction he's either caught backtracking, digging a deeper hole or otherwise taking an unpredictable course to recover. But never just the truth, a mea culpa or in any other way taking the humble path. It is filled with painful, awkward and often hilarious vignettes that then come with unexpected consequences of every kind.The novel takes place sometime before the Great War in Trieste. It's depiction of life, love and work are surprisingly modern. It's not a casual read. I found myself drifting and needing to go back and re-read portions. Although this is a reasonably long book the writing is economic in that you really don't want to miss what Zeno is saying, thinking or doing. There is something worthwhile in each passage.

I wanted to like this book, which I was reading for a book group, but in spite of James Joyce thinking it was great, I couldn't get past about 30 pages. The narrator is a guy who is very pleased with himself, but who is extremely unlikable, at least by me. And I think the author sees him as amusing. I didn't.

Italo Svevo, alias Ettore Schmitz, foresaw the World's overpopulllation and the lack of air to breath with one person each meter

AMAZING!

Tedious to read, the author's self-obsessed concerns with his family, his sex life, and the family firm have nothing very original to say and manage to say it all in a way which had this reader struggling to concentrate. Apart from its honesty about human selfishness, I cannot see why it should have been regarded as a significant novel in the days of Proust, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, Lawrence, Forster, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner, to name but a few. I only give it 2 stars because of its standing in the European literary canon - otherwise for me it's a zero. I regretted buying it but forced myself to read to the end, which I also regret.

Good book