"Zeno's Conscience" by Italo Svevo

Zeno is a rich but incredibly ineffectual hypochondriac. 

This novel is set in Trieste in the early years of the twentieth century (1900s) when Trieste, now part of Italy, was the naval base on the Adriatic Sea for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zeno is a rich man who over-analyses every thing he does, from getting married (to the wrong woman) to taking a mistress to being an immensely unsuccessful businessman. It seemed to me a rather more explicit version of The Diary of a Nobody except that it had fewer laughs and significantly more words. 

Perhaps that was the point. Zeno could not decide on any action unless he had considered it from every perspective. Usually, what he did was embarrassingly inappropriate, at which point he reanalyses everything to prove to himself that he was right after all. I suppose it was meant to be funny but the joke was suffocated under the weight of words. Wearisomely long-winded.

On the other hand, the meditation on Trieste by Jan Morris - Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere - is a superb book. 

Selected quotes:

• “I recall once staying a full half hour in a dark cellar, together with two other boys of whom I remember nothing but their childish clothing. Two pairs of short socks that stand erect because there were once bodies inside them, which time has erased.” (Smoke)
• “In the end, my days were full of cigarettes and of resolutions to smoke no more.” (Smoke)
• "Exercise? No, because experience told him that whatever moved eventually stopped." (My Father's Death) At school. I had a friend who was reluctant to exercise because he believed that one was endowed at birth with a certain number of heartbeats and he didn't want to use them up too quickly.
• "The most intense life is narrated, in synthesis, by the most rudimentary sound, that of the sea-wave, which, once formed, changes at every instant till it dies!" (The Story of My Marriage)
• "Those who have not experienced marriage believe it is more important than it is. The chosen companion will renew, improving or worsening, our breed by bearing children, so she induces us to believe that our wife will also bring about a renewal of ourselves:: a curious illusion not confirmed by any text." (The Story of My Marriage)
• “When I went to that house ... I counted the steps that led me to that upper floor, telling myself as if their number was odd it would prove she loved me, and it was always odd because there were forty-three of them.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “For all my efforts I achieved the result of that marksman who hit the bullseye, but of the target next to his.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “Giovanni ... thought at the top of his lungs.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “I retained those theories and I amplified them by reading Weininger. They never heal you, but they come in handy when you are chasing women.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “An imaginary sick man was genuinely sick, but more intimately and even more radically than the genuinely sick.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “It was a slightly forced smile: the true look of gratitude.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “The battle with sin in some circumstances becomes very difficult because you have to renew it every day and every hour: as long as the girl remains on that landing, in other words.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn't bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten; it ignores the erasures and reads everything still legible in our heart.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “The fact remains that when two people are hugging each other, they are in a position quite different from when one is cleaning the other shoes.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “Men in this world learn only by listening to themselves; in any case, they are unable to learn by listening to anyone else.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “A mistress shared is the least compromising mistress.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “The horrible period in which my children soiled and screamed would pass.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “All organisms extend along a line. At one end is Basedow’s disease, which implies the generous, mad consumption of vital force at a precipitous pace, the pounding of an uncurbed heart. At the other end are the organisms depressed through organic avarice, destined to die of a disease that would appear to be exhaustion but which is, on the contrary, sloth. The golden mean between the two diseases is found in the centre and is improperly defined as health, which is only a way-station.” (The Story of a Business Partnership) An Aristotelian view suggesting that happiness lies in moderation, between the extremes.
• “Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “Nothing is more conducive to meditation than watching the flow of water. You stand motionless, and the running water supplies the distraction needed, because it is never identical to itself, in its colour and its pattern, not even for a moment.” (Psychoanalysis)

August 2024; 437 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God