Zeno'S Conscience

“Zeno’s Conscience is a masterpiece a novel overflowing with human truth in all its murkiness laughter and terror a book as striking and relevant today as it was when it was first published and a book that is in every good way—its originality included—like life.” THE NEW REPUBLICItalo Svevo's masterpiece celebrates its 100 year anniversary with a delightful highly readable new translation. Hilarious provocative moving insightful and eerily prescient Zeno Cosini's observations and ruminations on human nature are as relevant today as when they ignited the admiration of James Joyce Ezra Pound and countless other writers and intellectuals when the novel was first published. This new edition includes footnotes on the culture language and history of Trieste the setting of the novel. And the novel's passages in the Triestine dialect are faithfully translated for the first time.""The poem of our complex modern madness"" Eugenio Montale winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature""A delicate compound of lyricism and irony"" James Lasdun THE GUARDIAN""This is something that could have been imagined only by Svevo. He is a thorny item a one-masterpiece master but a master nonetheless."" THE NEW YORKER""An extraordinary and slippery liar's memoir."" THE NEW REPUBLICZeno Cosini is an aging chain-smoking neurotic but very amusing and sometimes likable hypochondriac. A life-time pursuer of self-improvement Zeno decides to try the latest medical fad psychoanalysis. His new doctor advised him to keep a journal to help him remember the most salient episodes of his past stretching back to his childhood. It's a decision the doctor would come to regret. Zeno's recounting of his past is utterly perplexing and he doesn't hesitate to write unflattering things about his therapist before firing him. In an act of revenge the doctor publishes the journal without Zeno's consent with the title of Zeno's Conscience.