Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

The modern Italian classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, Zeno's Conscience is a marvel of psychological insight, published here in a fine new translation by William Weaver-the first in more than seventy years.

Italo Svevo's masterpiece tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man paralyzed by fits of ecstasy and despair and tickled by his own cleverness. His doctor advises him, as a form of therapy, to write his memoirs; 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.

With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed last cigarette (Zeno's famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) His amorous wanderings win him the shrill affections of an aspiring coloratura, and his confidence in his financial savoir-faire involves him in a hopeless speculative enterprise. Meanwhile, his trusting wife reliably awaits his return at appointed mealtimes.

Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inventively embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, Zeno's Conscience is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to the joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century.

Italo Svevo (1861-1928) was an Italian writer and businessman. He published two novels in the 1890s, A Life and As a Man Grows Older (the latter available from NYRB Classics), but after they were dismissed by critics and ignored by the public, he abandoned literature and went to work in his father-in-law's paint business. With the support of James Joyce, he returned to writing and published Zeno's Conscience in 1923 to international acclaim. Svevo had finished a new book and was at work on another when he was killed in a car crash in 1928.

Frederika Randall (1948-2020) was a writer, reporter, and translator. Among her translations are Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of an Italian and, for NYRB Classics, Guido Morselli's Dissipatio H.G. and The Communist. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Translation and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award; the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor's Tongue; and the Little Bookroom title San Francisco Noir. He is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New Orleans.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780375413308
ISBN 10	0375413308
Titel	Zeno's Conscience
Autor	Italo Svevo
Serie	Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsjahr	2001-11-06
Seitenanzahl	464
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar