Zeno's Conscience

The first new translation in more than 70 years of the modern Italian classic discovered and championed by James Joyce.

Zeno’s Conscience (previously translated as Confessions of Zeno) is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to the joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature. Italo Svevo tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man paralyzed by fits of despair and ecstasy and tickled by his own cleverness. His doctor advises him, as a form of therapy, to write his memoirs; and in doing so, Zeno reconstructs and ultimately reshapes the events of his life into a palatable reality for himself–a reality, however, founded on compromise, delusion, and rationalization.

Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, Zeno’s Conscience is a pioneering psychoanalytic novel by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the 20th century.

“Italo Svevo remains, with Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, one of the four unrivalled figures of twentieth century literature. An accomplished ironist, a complex visionary of the modern soul, an anatomist whose scalpel is as fierce as it is compassionate, Svevo is without a doubt Italy’s most serious modern novelist.
“From the self-deceived protagonist who forswears each of his attempts to give up cigarettes, to the final detonation which seems uncannily prescient of our atomic age, Zeno's Conscience, in the expert hands of William Weaver’s elegant and vigorous translation, reminds us ever again that if there is one phrase we should confer on Svevo it would be this: Svevo, our contemporary.”—Andre Aciman