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Zeno's Conscience

Italo Svevo,

William Weaver (Translator),

Claudio Carini (Narratore),

Beryl de Zoete (Translator),

Michael Hoffman (Preface)

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Jan 03, 2023 Chrissie rated it liked it

Shelves: classics, 2023-read, hf, philo-psychol, audible-uk, ww1, italy, medical, love, relationships

The book kept my attention as I read it, but the more I think about it, the less it appeals to me.

I chose to read this because there is a deficiency in the number of Italian authors I’ve read. It’s considered a classic and ranked among the likes of Joyce and Kafka. I considered it worth a try.

The story circles around an Italian businessman. His name is Zeno. He thinks he’s ill and wants to stop smoking, so having gone to physicians and taken many a pill, he decides to follow the advice of a psyc ...more

21 likes · Like · see review

Jul 28, 2015 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

This is a fascinating book which has a lot working against it (old views, old contexts lending themselves to some unfortunate views like sexism, light racism, etc) but, like an able dialectic, these only serve to augment this book's positives.

The story of Zeno and his battle with, essentially, himself and his litany of neurotic obsessions (and how this is reflected by and caused by and a cause of his external circumstances) is one that is uniquely, and enjoyably maddening. Though not always funn This is a fascinating book which has a lot working against it (old views, old contexts lending themselves to some unfortunate views like sexism, light racism, etc) but, like an able dialectic, these only serve to augment this book's positives.

The story of Zeno and his battle with, essentially, himself and his litany of neurotic obsessions (and how this is reflected by and caused by and a cause of his external circumstances) is one that is uniquely, and enjoyably maddening. Though not always funny, it's witty. And conversely when it isn't witty, it's funny. If I can sum up this book is one of those rare birds that succeeds almost because of its shortcomings.

Now, I hadn't heard of this text until some random reading gleaned for me the fact that the novel's author, Italo Svevo, was a student of James Joyce (yes, THAT Joyce). And upon reading that (and reading that he was a Secular Jewish author, a personal attachment of mine) I had to read it. And I'm glad I did despite some translation issues; namely, my edition was proofread by someone who either wasn't getting paid enough or simply was having a long series of bad days because it's pretty shoddy in places.

But all of that is immaterial to the meat of this text which is, at its heart, a perennially Jewish and concomitantly quintessentially human endeavor showcasing the very worst and, at times, the very best of human success. This human success is nothing grand in the vein of a Joyce or a Thomas Mann but something much more easy to relate to and universal, that of the success of living day to day with one's growing memorial pile of failures and successes, losses and triumphs, loves, obsessions, and finally death. As stated earlier though, this is a dialectic. And since it is a dialectic the book's final passages (wherein SPOILER Zeno muses in a darkly ironic shade of social darwinism ) is really only best understood as part of an equation of various integers. When Zeno ruminated about the world shaking off humanity like a disease (akin to a Carlin observation) I was left desiccated and more than a little down (a credit to the pathos Svevo was and is able to evince) and this was made more piquant with the idea of mortality, an idea that this book places glib, funny, and ultimately Kafkaesque with. We all die if we're not dying. It's the rare few that actually live (and escape mention in this novel).

To focus only on Zeno's final observations is to miss the forest for the trees, however. And much like a classic Woody Allen film the pathos and the humor interweave to form an image of what it means to be a thinking person in any (neurotic) age, that is to say worried and ceaseless in wondering what it is to be sure of anything. ...more

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