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Zeno #2
Further Confessions of Zeno
The sequel to 'The Confessions of Zeno', which was only partially completed before Svevo's untimely death in 1928.
302 pages, Hardcover
Published June 1, 1969
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526 people want to read
About the author
Italo Svevo
251 books478 followersAron Hector Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer.
A close friend of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Svevo was considered a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy and is best known for his classic modernist novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923), a work that had a profound effect on the movement.
A close friend of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Svevo was considered a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy and is best known for his classic modernist novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923), a work that had a profound effect on the movement.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 27, 2007
If you liked "Confessions of Zeno" this is the unfinished sequel in which Zeno copes with all the ailments and humiliations of growing old.
Not a full tale by any means, there is enough here to pique the interest of those who have read and remember the original book.
Not a full tale by any means, there is enough here to pique the interest of those who have read and remember the original book.
April 12, 2019
My reviewing has been sporadic...to say the least. There are many causes, not the least of which is a gaping all enveloping maw of a job that, along with an inconsistent body and even more precipitous mindset, makes finding the time and the energy necessary to sit and write out one's thoughts...problematic.
But I wanted to break my dry spell if only to prove that I still could. I'll let you (all) be the judge. I read Svevo's "Confessions of Zeno" a while back and greatly liked it for its wit, its neurotic humanity, and its warts and all style depiction of a certain group at a certain time. It was a great work, almost something of a Philip Roth pastiche with shadowed pillars of Joyce's modernism making itself known in its temporal and social context. Not the least of which Svevo's being at least partially Jewish was an appeal to me.
His follow up work, "The Further Confessions" is a step better as, much like Joseph Heller's "Closing Time" being a sequel of sorts to "Catch-22" it deals not with the wild vicissitudes of young people (namely men) grappling with the quotidian demands of life and death, it, here, ostensibly takes the logical follow up of older man dealing with the onset of change unto death. And Svevo does this marvelously. His characters aren't nice nor are they outright villains. They're just people. Under a lesser writer's pen these figures would have just become stock caricatures, even possibly mere stereotypes. But Svevo knew his subject as well as Philip Roth knew his, and perhaps with a touch more sensitivity and restraint.
All of this greatly works in Svevo's favor as unlike, say, a Jane Austen who managed to take a group of the most boring people imaginable during one of the most fascinating period of continental history (the napoleonic wars) and make them even more so, Svevo lends his flawed creations a neurotic zest and truth that transcends their time and place if only because we, as a civilization, really haven't changed too much in the intervening generations. Perhaps the methods of "youthful rejuvenation" have changed, but not our desire to get back what is irrevocably lost.
Make no mistake this is a flawed work. I get a little leery every time a write has a switch up of formatting and structure in the work (here Svevo alters his story from that of prose to a stage play which, apparently and notoriously, he rarely if ever finished) and the transition does mar Svevo's presentation a tad. But not much. And in the final summation what he has given us as readers is an eclectic cast of the aged and naive (oftentimes both) cogitating and endeavoring exhaustingly with what it is to exist in an age demarcated by grandness that most of them were, if at all, only tangentially a part of, the even in question of course being the then recent World War.
When I reached the final pages I couldn't help but smile as Svevo had achieved within his conclusion, incomplete and insubstantial as some might take it, a near perfect synthesis of his authorial personality and that of his entire created world. It isn't perfect but then none of us are and can ever hope to be. So if you have ever felt as though you were smaller than the world you were born into and that time had misplaced you within its own chapter and verse, read this, you'll feel the neurotic humanity that marks all men and women of true cogitative depth. Zeno comes to few answers by the end; but then so few ever do.
But I wanted to break my dry spell if only to prove that I still could. I'll let you (all) be the judge. I read Svevo's "Confessions of Zeno" a while back and greatly liked it for its wit, its neurotic humanity, and its warts and all style depiction of a certain group at a certain time. It was a great work, almost something of a Philip Roth pastiche with shadowed pillars of Joyce's modernism making itself known in its temporal and social context. Not the least of which Svevo's being at least partially Jewish was an appeal to me.
His follow up work, "The Further Confessions" is a step better as, much like Joseph Heller's "Closing Time" being a sequel of sorts to "Catch-22" it deals not with the wild vicissitudes of young people (namely men) grappling with the quotidian demands of life and death, it, here, ostensibly takes the logical follow up of older man dealing with the onset of change unto death. And Svevo does this marvelously. His characters aren't nice nor are they outright villains. They're just people. Under a lesser writer's pen these figures would have just become stock caricatures, even possibly mere stereotypes. But Svevo knew his subject as well as Philip Roth knew his, and perhaps with a touch more sensitivity and restraint.
All of this greatly works in Svevo's favor as unlike, say, a Jane Austen who managed to take a group of the most boring people imaginable during one of the most fascinating period of continental history (the napoleonic wars) and make them even more so, Svevo lends his flawed creations a neurotic zest and truth that transcends their time and place if only because we, as a civilization, really haven't changed too much in the intervening generations. Perhaps the methods of "youthful rejuvenation" have changed, but not our desire to get back what is irrevocably lost.
Make no mistake this is a flawed work. I get a little leery every time a write has a switch up of formatting and structure in the work (here Svevo alters his story from that of prose to a stage play which, apparently and notoriously, he rarely if ever finished) and the transition does mar Svevo's presentation a tad. But not much. And in the final summation what he has given us as readers is an eclectic cast of the aged and naive (oftentimes both) cogitating and endeavoring exhaustingly with what it is to exist in an age demarcated by grandness that most of them were, if at all, only tangentially a part of, the even in question of course being the then recent World War.
When I reached the final pages I couldn't help but smile as Svevo had achieved within his conclusion, incomplete and insubstantial as some might take it, a near perfect synthesis of his authorial personality and that of his entire created world. It isn't perfect but then none of us are and can ever hope to be. So if you have ever felt as though you were smaller than the world you were born into and that time had misplaced you within its own chapter and verse, read this, you'll feel the neurotic humanity that marks all men and women of true cogitative depth. Zeno comes to few answers by the end; but then so few ever do.
November 19, 2024
fantastico.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews