Reading Order
Zeno's ConscienceSvevo Zeno's Conscience Reading Order
Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience (1923) is the great Italian modernist novel — the fictional memoir of Zeno Cosini, an Italian businessman in Trieste who has been sent to a psychoanalyst to cure his inability to stop smoking, and who instead writes an autobiography that reveals him as one of the most brilliantly unreliable narrators in the history of fiction. Svevo — the pen name of Ettore Schmitz, a Triestine Jewish businessman — was a friend of James Joyce, who encouraged him to publish the novel after reading his earlier works; without Joyce's advocacy, one of the masterpieces of Italian modernism might have been permanently lost. Zeno's Conscience is a comic masterpiece — the story of a man so thoroughly dishonest with himself that his dishonesty becomes a form of wisdom.
Where to start
Zeno's Conscience
Complete Zeno's Conscience Book List
- 1Buy
Zeno's Conscience
Italo Svevo·1923·Svevo's masterpiece and the great Italian modernist novel — Zeno Cosini's unreliable memoir written for his psychoanalyst; one of the funniest and most psychologically acute novels in any language - 2Buy
As a Man Grows Older
Italo Svevo·1898·Svevo's second novel — Emilio Brentani's obsessive love for a working-class woman in Trieste; more conventionally structured than Zeno's Conscience but showing the development of Svevo's psychological technique - 3Buy
A Life
Italo Svevo·1892·Svevo's debut novel — Alfonso Nitti's failure to rise in Triestine banking society; very rarely read but historically interesting as the beginning of the project that culminates in Zeno's Conscience
Zeno's Conscience — Frequently Asked Questions
Who encouraged Svevo to publish Zeno's Conscience?
James Joyce, who was living in Trieste and teaching English. Svevo was one of Joyce's private English students, and their friendship was one of the most important literary relationships of the early twentieth century — Svevo encouraged Joyce in his work on Ulysses, and Joyce championed Svevo's fiction to French and English literary circles, helping to establish Zeno's Conscience's international reputation.
Is Zeno's Conscience really about smoking?
The novel begins with Zeno's attempt to stop smoking — his 'last cigarette' is a running joke that organizes the early chapters — but the memoir extends to cover Zeno's father's death, his marriage, his love affair, and his business partnership, all of which reveal him to be magnificently self-deceived. The smoking is Svevo's way of establishing the pattern of Zeno's relationship with his own desires: always promising to stop, never stopping, always finding elaborate reasons why this time was the exception.
What is Zeno's Conscience about?
Zeno's Conscience is the fictional memoir of Zeno Cosini, written at the request of his psychoanalyst and covering his inability to stop smoking, his father's death, his marriage (to the wrong woman), his love affair (with his wife's sister), and his business partnership (with his wife's other sister's husband). Each section reveals Zeno's magnificent capacity for self-deception while also demonstrating his unconscious accuracy about the world around him.
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