Confessions of Zeno (edition 1962)

"Forse traverso una catastrofe inaudita prodotta dagli ordigni ritorneremo alla salute. Quando i gas velenosi non basteranno piú, un uomo fatto come tutti gli altri, nel segreto di una stanza di questo mondo, inventerà un esplosivo incomparabile, in confronto al quale gli esplosivi attualmente esistenti saranno considerati quali innocui giocattoli. Ed un altro uomo fatto anche lui come tutti gli altri, ma degli altri un po’ piú ammalato, ruberà tale esplosivo e s’arrampicherà al centro della terra per porlo nel punto ove il suo effetto potrà essere il massimo. Ci sarà un’esplosione enorme che nessuno udrà e la terra ritornata alla forma di nebulosa errerà nei cieli priva di parassiti e di malattie." ( )

This early 20th century novel is ostensibly a journal kept by neurotic Italian businessman Zeno Cosini at the behest of his psychiatrist. Cosini, the heir to an import/export business which is managed in trust for his benefit, gives the reader his skewed outlook on such things as quitting his cigarette habit, the death of his father, the courtship of his wife, his marriage and acquisition of a mistress among other seminal events in his life.

The stories are relatively amusing and are very much period pieces, depicting life in the Balkan port city of Trieste near the turn of the century. The final two journal entries, by far the longest, concerning his acquisition and management of his mistress and his business partnership with his brother-in-law, both begin with promise, but soon bog down and ultimately become annoyingly repetitive and tedious. ( )

A gritty English version by Italophile Weaver (Open City: Seven Writers and Rome, 1999, etc.) resurrects one of the indispensable 20th-century novels: the work of a prosperous businessman (whose real name was Ettore Schmitz), it’s a majestically ironic in-depth portrayal, in his own reluctant words, of its eponymous protagonist’s ruefully unromantic struggles with his domineering father, then the querulous family into which he marries, as well as the ignoble ravages of adultery and aging, psychoanalysis and tobacco addiction. You can hear Flaubert’s pugnacious mandarin contempt for all things bourgeois, and Dostoevsky’s furious comic voice in “Svevo’s” measured revelations of the slow erosive effects of quotidian disillusionment and passivity. A revolutionary book, and arguably (in fact, probably) the finest of all Italian novels. ( )

How verbose... ( )

The teacher I had for the novel class, said this was his favotie nove.. While there were parts I liked overall I didn't think that highly of it. I did like the section about the death of his farther ( )