Zeno's Conscience
A memoir written at an analyst's instruction by a patient who lies throughout. The form is the joke and also the point.
In short, he is that slippery fish, the unreliable narrator, whose comedies unnerve us and whose inconsistencies troublingly resemble our own.
Zeno Cosini writes his life at the request of his analyst, Doctor S, who wants a full account before treatment can proceed. When Zeno abandons the analysis, the doctor prints the manuscript out of spite, opening it with a short, sour preface that warns the account cannot be trusted. What follows is organised not by chronology but by preoccupation: the endless last cigarette, the death of a father he both defies and mourns, the courtship that lands him with the wrong sister as a wife.
For a clinician, the interest sits in the gap between what Zeno reports and what the account lets slip. Every confession arrives pre-defended, each lapse recast as bad luck or another person's doing, and Zeno's reasoning tightens exactly where the feeling runs strongest. The narrator's memory reshapes his history as he sets it down, and the reader watches the material get managed in real time.
About the author
Italo Svevo
Italo Svevo was the pen name of Aron Ettore Schmitz (1861 to 1928), an Italian novelist from Trieste. He spent most of his working life in his father-in-law's marine paint business and wrote fiction in his spare time. His novel Zeno's Conscience (1923), narrated as a patient's account for his analyst, was among the earliest Italian novels to engage with psychoanalysis. His friend and English tutor, James Joyce, championed the book and helped bring it wider recognition.
Details
- 1923
- Italian
- 464
- 9780375413308