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A Review by Elizabeth Judd

Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno, first published in 1923, seems so effortlessly inventive and eerily prescient that one wonders why the novel isn't more widely appreciated. Championed by James Joyce and then largely ignored in the United States, Zeno's Conscience is a hilarious chronicle of a neurotic schemer whose desire to cure his various pathologies is exceeded only by his ability to rationalize them away.

Writing an autobiography at the behest of his despised psychoanalyst, Zeno Cosini loosely organizes his memories around such themes as "My Father's Death," "Wife and Mistress," and "Psychoanalysis." Deluded, solipsistic, and lazy, he begins by recounting the history of his consuming passion for smoking and his attempts to free himself of the addiction. Zeno lights up cigarettes to see if he'll be disgusted (and therefore healthy again), searches for meaningful dates on which to kick the habit, and is almost perpetually certain that he has just smoked for the last time. But it's the quitting that exhilarates him. One's final cigarette, Zeno believes, "gains flavor from the feeling of victory over oneself and the hope of an imminent future of strength and health."

For Zeno, true progress is impossible; life is thesis and antithesis, resolutions and backsliding. Perpetually on the rebound, he enters the family business after vacillating between law and chemistry degrees, and then marries the unattractive Augusta to prove that he no longer pines for her beautiful sister, Ada. Svevo's elliptical sentences convincingly reflect Zeno's psychological contradictions. "I was truly fond of Ada at that moment," Zeno thinks, "and it is a very strange thing to feel fondness for a woman one once ardently desired, did not possess, and who now matters not at all."

Given such contortions, Svevo can't be an easy author to translate. William Weaver, a Bard College professor who has translated Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, updates the novelist's idiosyncratic prose with great affection. In his perceptive introduction, Weaver explains that Svevo's Italian (his third language, after the Trieste dialect and German) was considered aesthetically wanting. In contrast to Beryl de Zoete's mellifluous translation, Weaver's version conscientiously preserves the choppiness of Svevo's ungainly style.

Weaver's biographical tidbits shed welcome light on Svevo's brilliantly offbeat project, which offers devastating and prophetic insights into psychoanalysis and the self-help movements it spawned. Ultimately, Zeno flunks out of therapy (he can't refrain from lying to his doctors), but somehow he emerges a little wiser. As World War I begins and old age approaches, Zeno finds a prescription for inner peace: "Sorrow and love -- life, in other words -- cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt."

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