In the Library
Confessions of Zeno
Italo Svevo, 1923
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 12 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Beryl de Zoete (1930)
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 167k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
I am the doctor who is sometimes spoken of in rather unflattering terms in this novel.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Both give a self-justifying narrator enough rope to hang himself, spinning elaborate rationalizations that reveal more than they conceal about his own weakness.
£1.99
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
Another confession told by a narrator who understands his own story far less than he thinks, discovering the truth as he writes it.
£1.99
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
Critics dubbed Svevo the Italian Proust for good reason: both mine memory and self-deception at enormous, digressive, deeply funny length.
£1.99
About the book
Every page of this confession is a lie, or so the doctor who publishes it insists in his opening note, furious that his patient quit analysis and mocked the whole undertaking on the way out. Zeno Cosini was told to write his life story as a cure for his smoking, and he cannot stop lighting one last cigarette: he marks the date on the wall each time, U.S. for ultima sigaretta, and breaks the promise again by morning. He falls for the beautiful sister, is refused, and somehow proposes his way into marrying the plain one instead, and she becomes the one part of his life he never manages to ruin. Every excuse he invents is more delightful than the truth it hides, and slowly you realize his sickness is only everyone's, dressed less carefully. Svevo lets him diagnose himself sane at the very end, right before predicting, with a straight face, the bomb that will finally scour the disease of life from the earth.