La Coscienza di Zeno Reading Order

La Coscienza di Zeno (Zeno's Conscience, 1923) by Italo Svevo is one of the masterpieces of European modernism — an unreliable first-person narration in which Zeno Cosini, a middle-aged Triestine businessman, writes his memoirs at the behest of his psychoanalyst. The joke is that Zeno is hilariously, spectacularly unreliable: he is a habitual last-cigarette smoker (every cigarette is his last, forever), a man who marries the wrong woman while desperately in love with another, a businessman who accidentally succeeds where his father-in-law's deliberate genius fails. Written in Trieste, the polyglot city of the Austro-Hungarian frontier, by a Jewish merchant who published his first two novels at his own expense and was largely ignored until James Joyce brought him to the attention of the French literary world, the novel stands at the centre of Italian modernism and at the intersection of Freud, Kafka, and Proust. Svevo's three novels — Una vita (1892), Senilità (1898), and La Coscienza di Zeno (1923) — form a loose trilogy of Triestine anti-heroes: men who fail upward, who love badly, who are inept at everything except self-deception. La Coscienza di Zeno is the summit of the three, the one in which Svevo found the perfect form for his peculiar vision — the psychoanalytic memoir as comedy, a form in which the narrator's constant self-exculpation and the reader's ironic distance create a portrait of a man both maddening and unforgettable.