Zeno's Conscience

Rene Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964

By Italo Svevo, New York, Vintage, 2003, p. 437

Some novels are so easy to love, and Zeno's Conscience feels as cozy as a mug of hot chocolate.  Go figure!  I have nothing in common with the protagonist.  Zeno is an upper-middle class Austrian-Italian businessman in the years before WWI.  Yet his sensibility feels, magically, like a heightened version of my own.  This book is high modernism at its most delicious.  Written at the behest of Zeno's psychiatrist, the novel is as a first-person memoir that tells five linked stories: Zeno's attempt to quit smoking ("LC" stands for Last Cigarette); the death of his father; the story of his marriage; the love he bears for his mistress; and his entry into psychoanalysis.  Zeno's memoir is published by his psychiatrist in revenge for Zeno leaving treatment.  

Like Proust, Svevo is concerned with the subjective experience of the passage of time and the unfolding of an individual's consciousness.  While Proust is lyrical and expansive, Svevo is crisply humorous with a flat prose style. Zeno discovers that meaning adheres to memory.   Life experienced in the present tense is a confusing bungle.  One's experiences come to have meaning retroactively; we uncover the significance of events only when they are arranged into a history.  In this book, Zeno places himself on the couch for us.  He explores a painful memory by following feelings backwards in time and mapping out the actions, thoughts, and associations related to those feelings.