Confessions of Zeno (Twentieth Century Classics)

Literature & Fiction

SVEVO, Italo

Contemporary

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Zeno's Conscience

Literary

Penguin Classics

Emilio's Carnival

In Senilita, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at thirty-five, and Angiolina, a seductively beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self-torment, the novel traces the intoxicating effect of a narcissistic and amoral woman on an indecisive daydreamer who vacillates between guilt and moral smugness.

United States

Yale University Press

Italo Svevo’s early novel Senilità (1898) remained unknown for many years until James Joyce encountered the novelist in Trieste and came to admire Senilità asa preeminent modern Italian novel. Joyce helped to launch Svevo’s career, and years later Svevo achieved great fame with his masterpiece, Confessions of Zeno. In Senilità, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at thirty-five, and Angiolina, a seductively beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self-torment, the novel traces the intoxicating effect of a narcissistic and amoral woman on an indecisive daydreamer who vacillates between guilt and moral smugness. The novel is suffused with a tragic sense of existence, and the unbreachable distance between one consciousness and another. Svevo’s unmistakably modern voice subtly captures rapid shifts in mood and intention, exploiting irony, indirection, and multiple points of view to reveal Emilio’s increasing anguish as he comes to recognize the dissonance between himself and his world.

The modern Italian classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, Zeno’s Conscience is a marvel of psychological insight, published here in a fine new translation by William Weaver–the first in more than seventy years.
Italo Svevo’s masterpiece tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man paralyzed by fits of ecstasy and despair and tickled by his own cleverness. His doctor advises him, as a form of therapy, to write his memoirs; in doing so, Zeno reconstructs and ultimately reshapes the events of his life into a palatable reality for himself–a reality, however, founded on compromise, delusion, and rationalization.
With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed “last cigarette!” (Zeno’s famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) His amorous wanderings win him the shrill affections of an aspiring coloratura, and his confidence in his financial savoir-faire involves him in a hopeless speculative enterprise. Meanwhile, his trusting wife reliably awaits his return at appointed mealtimes.
Zeno’s adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inventively embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, Zeno’s Conscience is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to the joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century.

Zeno's Conscience: Introduction by William Weaver (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

Everyman"s Library

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and endlessly self-deluding mind. The mind in question belongs to Zeno Cosini, a neurotic Italian businessman who is writing his confessions at the behest of his psychiatrist. Here are Zeno’s interminable attempts to quit smoking, his courtship of the beautiful yet unresponsive Ada, his unexpected–and unexpectedly happy–marriage to Ada’s homely sister Augusta, and his affair with a shrill-voiced aspiring singer. Relating these misadventures with wry wit and a perspicacity at once unblinking and compassionate, Zeno’s Conscienceis a miracle of psychological realism.

Zeno's Conscience: A Novel

Vintage

hardback with dustjacket (well preserved, but old adhesive tape browning to flaps, library bookplate and stamp to title, good

As A Man Grows Older

Secker and Warburg (London)

A bank clerk torn between routine and art, between true love and its impostor

Life

KNOPF

. no dustjacket, slight fading to spine, 1969, clean copy

Further confessions of Zeno (The Uniform edition of Svevo's works, vol. 5)

Secker Warburg

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.

Confessions of Zeno

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Books by SVEVO, Italo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SVEVO, Italo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Confessions of Zeno (Twentieth Century Classics)

Zeno's Conscience

Emilio's Carnival

Emilio's Carnival

Zeno's Conscience: Introduction by William Weaver (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

Zeno's Conscience: A Novel

As A Man Grows Older

Life

Further confessions of Zeno (The Uniform edition of Svevo's works, vol. 5)

Confessions of Zeno