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Title: Confessions of Zeno (Vintage International) by Italo Svevo, Beryl De Zoete ISBN: 0-679-72234-3 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 June, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: still great
Comment: Having read this book over ten years ago, it is nice to know that it reads better now (probably because I understand more of Svevo's concerns). The book isn't a comedy, it's a sad and moving look at the last century's human condition. It is an end of cycle lament at the start of modernism, the first shots of postmodernism and the loss of humanity this all ensues. Technology leads to the bomb and the obssession with consumerism and political correctness that have made our era a tragic one. Literature is the only secular salve for bruised lives and quests for happiness.
Rating: 5
Summary: James Joyces' Favorite Seinfeld Episode
Comment: I first bought this book in 1984, when I was taking a class on James Joyce. I'd heard it was Joyce's favorite book. It took me 15 years to actually get a copy and READ it because I was a little intimidated. Yeah, it's great literature, yeah, it strips a man to his soul, and shows you the inner workings of a pathetic mind, BUT the way I've sold my friends on it is this: Confessions of Zeno is nothing less than a 1920s Italian Seinfeld episode. Zeno is George. Spiteful, conniving, kinda smart and kinda dumb at the same time, lying to himself and everyone around him, getting in trouble, hitting on women left and right, and above all else, laugh-out-loud funny.
If that appeals to you, buy it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Zeno's paradox
Comment: As a great Seinfeld fan previous reviewers drew my attention to this book as "James Joice's favorite Seinfeld episode" and by describing its protagonist as literature's own George Costanza.
Indeed, certain passage from this book put the highly neurotic hero in Seinfeldian situations, but just like the honorable Jason Alexander Zeno Cosini to me was too much of a lightweight to carry a plot on his own. In addition, while an episode like Zeno and the three sisters is very comic, the following chapters involving infidelity and the business relationship with brother-in-law Guido are definitely more tragic than comic. While the resolution in the final chapter helps to put things in some perspective, I certainly did not have the "Aha Erlebnis" that others described.
Yet, putting this book in context it was definitely ahead of its time. Of course one could see this book as "August Strindberg in Trieste", but there is clear grounds to see Zeno as a symbol of Italy before world war one.
So for everyone ready for a tragic-comedic diary of a recovering self-obsessed neurotic this is definitely a book of interest.
Poor Zeno, too bad that you were created before the great Paolo Conte. He would have cured you immediately with his "comme di, la comedy da vie" (how do you put life's comedy into words)!
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Title: Fontamara (Italian texts) by Ignazio Silone ISBN: 0719006627 Publisher: Manchester University Press Pub. Date: 1977 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Sea of Memory: A Novel by Erri De Luca, Beth Archer Brombert, Enrico De Luca, Beth Brombert ISBN: 0880016787 Publisher: Ecco Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: I'm Not Scared by NICCOLO AMMANITI, JONATHAN HUNT ISBN: 1400075637 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 24 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Invention of Truth: A Novel by Marta Morazzoni, M.J. Fitzgerald ISBN: 0394580885 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 May, 1993 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Late Mattia Pascal (Eridanos Library) by Luigi Pirandello, William Weaver ISBN: 0941419444 Publisher: Marsilio Publishers Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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