SVEVO, Italo. Confessions of Zeno. London: Putnam. 1930.
8vo. Publishers marbled cloth design with green title lettering to spine; green top edge and rough-cut edges, partially uncut pages; scarce dust jacket; pp. [4], 412, [4]; offsetting to endpapers and minimal spotting to prelims; clipped dust jacket toned at spine with minor wear to extremities.
First English Edition of arguably the first important experimental novel in Italian.
"A confession in writing is always a lie"- Zeno
Italo Svevo (1861-1928) was born Ettore Schmitz in Trieste into a Jewish family of German and Italian descent. Publishing two novels in the 1890s that came to little critical acclaim and were disregarded by the public, A Life and As a Man Grows Older, he turned to the advice of James Joyce to tutor him in English. Upon reading Svevo's work, Joyce was thoroughly impressed and, with his friends help, published the Confessions of Zeno in 1923 which granted him international commendation. The prominent poet, Eugenio Montale, recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature, also played a crucial part in the novelist’s advancement.
The Confessions of Zeno is structured as a sequence of conversations with a man's psychoanalyst which he relays as memories and was innovative of its time. With Zeno being an unreliable narrator in this sense, he relays a series of tales including his addiction to cigarettes and the precarious state of his marriage, employing Freudian psychology to advance his narrative all against the ominous backdrop of impending war.
#2121275