‘Italy’s first modernist … a marvellous writer, unjustly neglected. Svevo is a master.’ - The New Yorker

The cult classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, Confessions of Zeno is a miracle of psychological realism from one of the most important figures in modern Italian literary history. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce, Musil, Proust and Kafka.

When the vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno’s account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. Zeno’s adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, Confessions of Zeno 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.

Praise:

‘One of the indispensable 20th-century novels … A revolutionary book, and arguably (in fact, probably) the finest of all Italian novels.’ - Kirkus Reviews

‘Hilarious … Effortlessly inventive and eerily prescient.’ - The Atlantic Monthly

‘One of the great comic novels of the twentieth century … [Svevo is] perhaps the most significant Italian modernist novelist.’ - The Times Literary Supplement

‘There are moments where his realism seems, by the sheer strangeness and rawness of what lies exposed under its microscopic focus, only a hair’s breadth away from the austere fabulism of Kafka.’ - The Guardian

‘Svevo’s masterpiece.’ - Los Angeles Times

About the author:

Italo Svevo, one of Italy’s great Modernists, was unrecognized in his own country until James Joyce befriended the writer and championed his work. His three novels, A Life, As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno, are all recognised as masterpieces of Italian literature.