Zeno's Conscience became an immediate favorite of mine. Zeno is witty, self-deprecating, sly, ironically ignorant of himself, but at glimpses he is a man of self-reflecting genius. Zeno and Leopold Bloom share their origins in Svevo himself, and the classical "everyman" is well-crafted in both of them, in Zeno in particular is the "lovable fool" which seems to have a tradition in Italian modern literature (notably Calvino's Marcovaldo and Palomar). The novel's premise is the self-narrated story of a man who has submitted himself to Freudian psychoanalysis in hopes to snapping his addiction to cigarettes. Each chapter, which are laid out in a vaguely linear way through Zeno's life, navigates a particular facet of his life: his addiction to cigarettes, his relationship with his father, his romantic pursuit of his wife (following the cumulative failed pursuits of her two sisters), his difficulties in business, and his experience with his hack-psychologist. The narrative is tirelessly funny in an ironical and quirky way: the character of Zeno is shamelessly himself, falling only under the reign of his own misguided systems of logic and reason, and doggedly defending them throughout. He is a peculiar man, fixated with strange notions of the importance of dates, the significance of signs and letters/names, in fact he is strangely and uniquely superstitious in the Western canon of protagonists. Furthermore, he is almost too human in his contradictions and short-comings. He is at once ironically ignorant of himself, and at turns lambently insightful: Now that I am here, analyzing myself, I am seized by a suspicion: Did I perhaps love cigarettes so much because they enabled me to blame them for my clumsiness? Who knows? If I had stopped smoking would I have become the strong, ideal man I expected to be? Perhaps it was this suspicion that bound me to my habit, for it is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.Who hasn't felt that he was genius but that due to a number of external factors his own genius was left dormant, unrealized, wholly internal? It is comforting to imagine that we are capable of greatness, but that that greatness is simply unrealized. But what is genius without ambition? That is the question mark which is answered in the person of Zeno. The name Zeno itself is likely the heir of Zeno of Elea, whose paradoxes are famous for their reduction of motion to absurdity. What are the Confessions of Zeno if not a lesson in absurdity? A lesson in the futility and illusion of motion and progress? We see Zeno as a young man, as a suitor, as a businessman, as a father, as a son, and always he is the same, he is immutable in his consistence of absurdity. Consider Zeno's paradox of the arrow: it must always reach the halfway between A and B before it can reach its destination, but there will always be a midpoint that must be reach ad infinitum: therefore it will never reach point B. Of course this is absurd: observing the real world, we know that an arrow shot from point A will reach a point B in a fraction of a second. However, this absurd and paradoxical logic is the premise of the character of Zeno: If I didn’t go ahead, it was because of some doubts about myself. I was waiting to become nobler, stronger, worthier of my divine maiden. That could happen any day. Why not wait? Before he can commit himself to the enterprise of marriage he must feel suited for the position, in the blurry metrics of nobility, strength, and worth: goals which are so vaguely definable that they would be impossible to reach, like Zeno's arrow, always encroaching only on the midpoint. The question of the protagonist's sanity is constantly at odds with the question of his doctor's ability and qualifications: which is the insane one? We are constantly held in the realm of uncertainty of what to believe, who to believe. One question which tickled me throughout was the question of Zeno's sexuality: his feelings for the novel's women are scant at best, and fleeting at most: he seems to constantly feel the compulsion to re-assert or convince himself of his love for his wife, who was his last choice, and his vehicle for tying him to her father. Throughout the novel, Zeno positions himself as a satellite to a series of apotheosized and envied men: Zeno's father, Mr. Malfenti, and Guido: all men of confidence and ability which Zeno envies, admires, and pursues. Furthermore his relationship with women is so timid such that it breeds guilt and subservience: he considers himself unworthy even to the most unworthy, base, and unfitting women, he allows himself to be domineered by them, allows his life's vessel to be steered by them between the twin catastrophes of failure and ambition. While Zeno apparently admires the novel's men, it is in a distracted non-emulating way: he is provided for, he is set-up, he does not need to be successful, and in fact fears success. It would seem that whether it is success in violin or in business, what he champions in these envied men is their stable masculinity: a masculinity which he tries to emulate unsuccessfully through marital infidelities (a constant across his father, Malfenti, and Guido, which becomes to Zeno emblematic of modern masculinity). Despite the questions and nagging uncertainty around Zeno's sexuality and his relations with these priapic idols, the reader is ever rebuffed in his analysis of the narrator's character by the dauntless attacks on psychoanalysis throughout the novel.Despite the drama and difficulties of Zeno's story, he acknowledges in part his own fault, his tireless search, not for the traditional "meaning" in life, but rather the frivolous adventure: Nothing new had happened to me. I sincerely believe that I have always needed adventure, or some complication resembling it. In life there is always this desire for something new, and adventure, or significantly something which resembles adventure, happiness, novelty. In the immortal words of Proust our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it. We constantly ache for something new, even if it is worse; this perversion is a side-effect of happiness, of cankering complacency. It is darkest shadow directly below the lambency of happiness: when we are most happy, we are reminded of the transience of happiness, of the immediacy and imminence of death. Zeno is constantly being confronted by the deaths of his idols, in fact all three men which figure so highly on the pedestal of his admiration meet their ends throughout the story, ends which Zeno tries his best to avoid accepting into his unshakable illusion of reality: deaths which become dates on his walls, representing not death but resolutions to quit smoking, to remain faithful, to change, but all resolutions which are forgotten and broken, and so too those dates and those deaths recede into the necropolis of the past.Because the novel is written in the present, looking back on the past, the dimension of time is especially significant to Zeno, and it colors all of his recollections. He acknowledges, in a glimmer of truth, the play of time on fact and creation, how time mediates reality into episodes which are as true as they are fiction: the difference between which time makes insignificant. If you convince yourself that something happened in the past, if you are thorough and consistent in your belief of this illusion of the past: is it any different to you than if it actually happened? Following Hamlet's adage of "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" this is precisely the case. Zeno admits, or lies, at the end of the novel that many of the events of his personal account have been fabricated, embellished, omitted, or otherwise altered, but asserts that they have the same colors, scents, sense of reality as living things, as real memories; that he knows they are fabulous is irrelevant because the reality he has assigned them makes them as close to reality as the blurry shades and shapes of his own kaleidoscopic memories. For months and months that hope supported me and animated me. Didn't it mean producing, through vital memory, in full winter the roses of May? The doctor himself guaranteed that the memory would be vivid and complete, such that it would amount to an extra day in my life. The roses would have all their scent and perhaps also their thorns.Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie. Mine were inventions like those of a fever, which walk around the room so that you can see them from every side, and then they touch you. They had the solidity, the color, the insolence of living things. Thanks to my desire, I projected the images, which were only in my brain, into the space where I was looking, a space whose air I could sense, and its light, and even the blunt corners that were never lacking in any space through which I passed.
"A differenza delle altre malattie la vita è sempre mortale. Non sopporta cure."Solitamente, valuto i libri che leggo in modo prevalentemente soggettivo, vale a dire a seconda di quanto la storia mi abbia coinvolta, quanto i personaggi mi abbiano conquistato, fino a che punto la penna dell'autore/autrice sia riuscita a toccare le mie corde. L'analisi oggettiva del testo preferisco lasciarla ai critici; quando io parlo di libri cerco di farlo con raziocinio e buon senso, senza dubbio, ma sopra ogni altra cosa mi piace farlo col cuore. Ora, volendo discuterne da un punto di vista oggettivo, La coscienza di Zeno supera in pieno l'esame: si prefigge come obiettivo un'analisi psicologica del protagonista e riesce in pieno nell'intento, la finzione narrativa creata nel primo capitolo regge perfettamente, i personaggi sono senza eccezioni tutti ben caratterizzati, lo stile è abbastanza fluido pur non meritando particolari elogi.Ma come ho detto prima, a me serve ben altro.Quando ho iniziato questa lettura avevo ben presente in mente il fatto che Svevo qui aveva intenzione di creare un protagonista assolutamente inetto, del tutto incapace di vivere, eternamente combattuto tra le sue spinte interiori e le convenzioni che la società gli impone. Non avevo però fatto i conti con la mia esauribile capacità di sopportazione. Arrivare alla fine (o più che altro fino ai due terzi del libro, perché lì le cose un po' cambiano, ma ci arriveremo) è stato un parto, e proprio a causa di questo protagonista. Ad un certo punto ero talmente irritata che ho dovuto trovare un modo per sfogarmi, sfogo che ha dato origine ad una lista "a caldo" di tutto ciò che odiavo di tale Mr. Cosini. I punti di questa lista, scarabocchiati in grafia indecifrabile tranne che per la proprietaria alias me stessa, recitano:vittimismo acutoirrecuperabilmente idiotaeterno indecisoimpulsivoschizofrenico (ma questo ci sta)inconsciamente egoista/ falsamente altruistadevo precisare che io stessa devo fare uno sforzo per ricordare cosa acciderbola io abbia voluto dire con l'ultimo punto (tengo a ricordare che è una lista stilata a caldo durante la lettura) ma ora mi spiegherò meglio.Quello che a Zeno non sono proprio riuscita a perdonare è il suo comportamento verso la moglie. Non tanto per il fatto che la tradisca, qualche coups de théâtre ci voleva, ma per i ragionamenti che fa. Secondo lui 1. andare con l'amante non è un'offesa per sua moglie, però sono un'offesa per lei le dimostrazioni d'affetto dell'amante verso di lui 2. quando si ritrova ad essere geloso dell'amante, chiama pomposamente la sua gelosia «senso di giustizia» perché «doveva pur toccargli (a Zeno) quello che si meritava» 3. se l'amante del marito della sorella della moglie divenisse anche amante sua, questo farebbe meno male alla moglie e alla sorella della moglie, perché avere un'amante in due non è come averne una tutta per sé (?). Questi sono i pensieri assolutamente sconclusionati che mi guastano il piacere della lettura. Va bene che stiamo parlando di un soggetto con qualche problema a livello emotivo/psicologico, altrimenti non staremmo qui a parlarne, ma questo no. Anche perché dai pensieri che fa, dalle azioni che compie (esulando però dall'ambito sentimentale) Zeno Cosini dimostra chiaramente di non essere pazzo. Un po' idiota, forse, e leggermente squilibrato, ma non totalmente pazzo.Perciò, se il capitolo riguardante l'amante è stato quello che più seriamente mi ha fatto dubitare delle potenzialità di questo libro, il resto non ha suscitato in me particolari incazzature.Inoltre, per quanto mi riguarda, questo romanzo è un classico esempio di romanzo bipartito: la prima parte non ha fatto altro che alimentare la mia antipatia verso il protagonista, la seconda l'ha sopita in maniera stupefacente. E' come se a partire da pagina 260 si sia messo magicamente la testa a posto, cogliendo l'occasione per fare ampio sfoggio del suo buon senso di nuova acquisizione in più di un caso.L'essere riuscita ad apprezzare almeno un minimo il personaggio mi ha aiutato a fare chiarezza e a scorgere un aspetto di lui che mi ha fatto guardare all'intera vicenda sotto un'altra luce: nel suo conflitto interiore, le convenzioni contro gli istinti, quello che Zeno cerca è la sincerità, una sincerità che lui anela, brama, che cerca di attribuire a se stesso attraverso tutte le giustificazioni e i ragionamenti possibili, una sincerità nella quale vede la sua unica possibilità di redenzione. Redenzione dalla mancanza di affetto del padre, che come ultimo gesto aveva voluto schiaffeggiare lui, suo figlio. Redenzione dalla sua inadeguatezza, che gli aveva impedito di conquistare la donna amata costringendolo a sposare la brutta sorella di lei. Redenzione dal destino benevolo, che nonostante lui non ne faccia mai una giusta non gliene fa mai andare una storta.Infine, vorrei fare un omaggio alle incredibili ultime pagine, anzi, a tutto l'ultimo capitolo, che mi ha decisamente convinta a cambiare idea su Zeno, la sua coscienza & combriccola.Adesso ho detto davvero tutto quello che avevo da dire su questo libro, che poi corrispondeva a tutto quello che avevo da dire su Mr. Zeno Cosini. Mi ha irritata, intenerita, lasciata sgomenta, insomma, ha lasciato un'impronta indelebile nel mio cuore, e per questo lo ringrazio.
What do You think about Zeno's Conscience (2003)?
I read Zeno's Conscience because I saw it on a 2002 list of the 100 greatest works of literature compiled by the Norwegian Book Clubs with the help of 100 authors from around the world and wanted to take a look at it. After a few pages, I was hooked. It purports to be a diary that was written for a psychiatrist, and which the psychiatrist has published for his own benefit rather than for the hero/narrator, Zeno Cosini, a well-to-do businessman of moderate talent in the city of Trieste, then under Austro-Hungarian control. What is it that I immediately loved about this novel? One could look in vain for something to quote, so it is obviously not its style that appeals to me. Perhaps it is Zeno himself, and Italo Svevo's attitude toward him. In a word, Zeno is something of a nebbish. He is ineffective in business (but fortunately, the company he inherited from his father is under the competent management of a talented businessman named Olivi, who brooks no interference from the son and heir). He is a balding chain smoker. He falls in love with two daughters of a local businessman named Malfenti who reject his proposals -- and he winds up marrying the ugly one with a squint, Augusta, with whom he nonetheless falls increasingly in love.In the meantime, the daughter he loved most, Ada, falls for one Guido Speier, who plays the violin better than Zeno, who speaks better Italian than Zeno, who looks better than Zeno. And, like a true nebbish, Zeno enters into a business partnership with him -- only to find out that his new brother-in-law is an incompetent dreamer. He conducts an affair with a trophy secretary he hires (Zeno, too, has strayed from his Augusta). Eventually, he commits suicide.One interesting thing about Zeno is that he has some problem going to funerals. He misses the funeral of his father, of his best friend, and of his brother-in-law Guido. During the course of her marriage with Guido, Ada has lost much of her looks due to illness; and Zeno marvels at it all.I ask again: What is it that I love about this novel? I don't seem to be any closer to giving an answer. Perhaps I see in it an emotional nakedness -- a personification of Shakespeare's speech by King Richard IINor I nor any man that but man isWith nothing shall be pleased, till he be easedWith being nothing.And Zeno is nothing, but a lovable nothing. I wouldn't lend him money without regretting it; I wouldn't let him close to the woman I loved; but I wouldn't mind spending time with him in otherwise complete friendship and amity.Much is made of the friendship between Svevo and James Joyce, and there is little doubt that Svevo's career was made by that friendship. (And it is said that, furthermore, Svevo was the original for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.) But until Italo Svevo and his Zeno Cosini came along, there wasn't anyone in fiction that I really recognized as being a person who could walk off the page and actually exist. Zeno is not merely a literary construct, shored up with a sense of style. I feel as if I could run into him tomorrow and be somewhat annoyed by his endlessly puffing a cigarette, only to fall under his spell, as I fell under Svevo's spell.
—Jim
Ho impiegato quasi due mesi per leggere questo libro. E per la prima volta ho letto più libri contemporaneamente. Mai avevo abbandonato la lettura di un libro per poi riprenderla a tappe successive. E noto che non è un comportamento singolare il mio. Svevo fornisce il ritratto esatto di quel periodo e dell'animo umano pur servendosi del peggior protagonista possibile. Non un eroe, non un criminale ma un piccolo borghese con i suoi vizi e le sue vicende a dir poco tediose. E' la noia il minimo comun denominatore del romanzo. Eppure è un classico, è il libro che prima o poi leggiamo tutti. Perchè? E' senza dubbio un opera molto curata, l'autore aveva un particolare scopo e le pagine ne sono pregne. Purtroppo la vicenda non permette di andare a scavare come egli voleva, almeno non per quanto mi riguarda e non di questi tempi. Risulta difficile evincere un particolare insegnamento proprio a causa della noia e della scarsa voglia di continuare la storia. Nonostante tutto, arrivato stoicamente alla fine sono riuscito, anche grazie al finale inaspettato, ad apprezzare questo romanzo. Prima di leggere Senilità però, ci penserò due volte!
—Davide
Libro preferito della mia migliore amica d'infanzia,La Coscienza di Zeno mi ha lasciata interdetta. Svevo non si é fatto per niente amare, e nemmeno Zeno. Iniziato una prima volta e abbandonato dopo un capitolo appena (IO che abbandono un libro? Questo é grave . ) l'ho ripreso una seconda volta,per poi riabbandonarlo al quarto. Finito al terzo tentativo,dopo essermi scervellata ed annoiata al cospetto dei piccoli e mediocri drammi borghesi perbenino di Zeno,disgustata dalla sua mania di segnare le date delle ultime sigarette ed ancor più dalle sue debolezze e vizi,posso dirmi fortunata ad essere ancora viva. Se avere una coscienza significa questo,io preferisco mille volte il grillo parlante.
—Fede
