‘Italy’s first modernist … a marvellous writer, unjustly neglected. Svevo is a master.’ – The New Yorker
The cult classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, Confessions of Zeno is a miracle of psychological realism from one of the most important figures in modern Italian literary history. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce, Musil, Proust and Kafka.
When the vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno’s account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. Zeno’s adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, Confessions of Zeno 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.
Praise:
‘One of the indispensable 20th-century novels … A revolutionary book, and arguably (in fact, probably) the finest of all Italian novels.’ – Kirkus Reviews
‘Hilarious … Effortlessly inventive and eerily prescient.’ – The Atlantic Monthly
‘One of the great comic novels of the twentieth century … [Svevo is] perhaps the most significant Italian modernist novelist.’ – The Times Literary Supplement
‘There are moments where his realism seems, by the sheer strangeness and rawness of what lies exposed under its microscopic focus, only a hair’s breadth away from the austere fabulism of Kafka.’ – The Guardian
‘Svevo’s masterpiece.’ – Los Angeles Times
About the author:
Italo Svevo, one of Italy’s great Modernists, was unrecognized in his own country until James Joyce befriended the writer and championed his work. His three novels, A Life, As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno, are all recognised as masterpieces of Italian literature.
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The father of modern Italian novel, Italo Svevo (pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz) was an Italian novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist, critic and business man.Svevo (whose pseudonym means ‘Italian Swabian’) was the son of a German-Jewish glassware merchant and an Italian mother. At 12 he was sent to a boarding school near Würzburg, Germany. He later returned to a commercial school in Trieste, but his father’s business difficulties forced him to leave school and become a bank clerk. He continued to read on his own and began to write.Svevo’s first novel, A Life (1892), was revolutionary in its analytic, introspective treatment of the agonies of an ineffectual hero (a pattern Svevo repeated in subsequent works). A powerful but rambling work, the book was ignored upon its publication. So was its successor, As a Man Grows Older (1898), featuring another bewildered hero. Svevo had been teaching at a commercial school, and, with As a Man’s failure, he formally gave up writing and became engrossed in his father-in-law’s business.Ironically, business frequently required Svevo to visit England in the years that followed, and a decisive step in his life was to engage a young man, James Joyce, in 1907 as his English tutor in Trieste. They became close friends, and Joyce let the middle-aged businessman read portions of his unpublished Dubliners, after which Svevo timidly produced his own two novels. Joyce’s tremendous admiration for them, along with other factors, encouraged Svevo to return to writing. He wrote what became his most famous novel, Confessions of Zeno (1923), a brilliant work in the form of a patient’s statement for his psychiatrist. Published at Svevo’s own expense, as were his other works, this novel was also a failure, until a few years later, when Joyce gave Svevo’s work to two French critics, Valéry Larbaud and Benjamin Cremieux, who publicised him and made him famous.While working on a sequel to Zeno, Svevo was killed in an automobile accident. Svevo has been recognised as one of the most important figures in modern Italian literary history and his three novels, A Life, As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno, are all recognised as masterpieces of Italian literature.
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