Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

In this city, after the outbreak of the war, we are more bored than ever, and, as a substitute for psychoanalysis, I have returned to my beloved papers. For a year I hadn't written a word; in this, as in everything else, obeying the doctor, who commanded that during my therapy I was to reflect only when I was with him, because unsupervised reflection would reinforce the breaks that inhibited my sincerity, my relaxation. But now I find myself unbalanced and sicker than ever, and, through writing, I believe I will purge myself of the sickness more easily than through my therapy. At least I am sure that this is the true system for restoring importance to a past no longer painful, and the dispelling the dreary present more quickly.

Zeno Cosini, an aging businessman in postwar Italy, finds himself in the analyst's chair. He has a deep distrust of the analyst, and is determined to work through his "conscience" on his own, by writing the tome in our hands known as Zeno's Conscience. The story begins with the death of his father and moves through Zeno's association with the well-to-do Malfenti family, whose patriarch takes Zeno in as a kind of surrogate son. Malfenti has only daughters, and it's from these daughters that Zeno feels he must take his choice of a wife: he is deeply in love with the beautiful but cold Ada, and when she spurns him, he turns to the studious Alberta, then a third, Anna, but they spurn him, too, and he turns with despair to Augusta, the plainest of the four, who has nurtured a crush on Zeno for a long time. She understands that he does not love her, but she accepts, believing she will make a good wife--and she does. This picture of a "good marriage" makes Zeno's Conscience rather unique, even as Zeno undertakes a rather pathetic affair with an amateur opera singer.

I really enjoyed Zeno's Conscience, though I fear that I read it too slowly to have much interesting to say about it. It's interesting to see a book about Freudian analysis from 1923, when it was still in its relative infancy; the novel moves very naturalistically and has little of the qualities we might associate with fragmented modernism in a Freudian mode. I think what I liked best about it is how it captures Zeno as a character who acts from impulse and id even when he knows that his actions are wrong or unlikely to lead to happiness; Svevo captures the lengths we will go through to capture the attentions of a member of the opposite sex we know will never really want us in return, even in the face of evidence that we can see and understand clearly. I've heard Zeno called an "unreliable narrator," but I don't know that that phrase really captures what's going on; the later Zeno who is writing understands himself quite well, even as the Zeno of the time doesn't. We share that quality with the writing Zeno, looking back at foolish actions with the knowledge of better judgment.

Zeno strikes up a business relationship with Guido, the Argentinean whom Ada marries. His former love for Ada colors the relationship between Zeno, Guido, and the Malfentis, with many resulting misunderstandings, but Guido and Zeno actually become rather close friends. When Guido becomes a little too addicted to speculating on the stock market, the Malfentis turn to Zeno to help save him, and Zeno is cast suddenly in the position of being the responsible and soberly judging one. Guido is well-meaning and naive, and his speculation is the beginning of a horrible and tragic downfall. One thing that I got from his chapter is a sense that Guido is the one, more than Zeno, who might have benefitted from analysis, that Zeno may not always understand himself with clarity and precision, but that Guido is the true master of repression and foolish self-denial. The ending of Guido's story is, as the rest of the novel is, both deeply sad and somehow riotously funny, as when (spoiler alert) Zeno ends up missing Guido's funeral because he follows the wrong procession to the wrong cemetery.