Confessions of Zeno
by Italo Svevo

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Summary of Confessions of Zeno

As we soon discover, Zeno is a master is the convoluted rationalization. He concocts numerous reasons why his "last cigarette" needn't truly become his last; he strives endlessly to convince himself that he loves his wife; he tirelessly justifies an awkward affair, all the while vacillating between a paralysis of action and a lazy submission. "My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses," Zeno proclaims early on. (Later he backpedals even further, confessing that his "resolutions existed for their own sake and had no practical results whatever.") As a last-ditch tactic, he transmutes his disappointments into inevitabilities--an act of creative bookkeeping that becomes steadily creepier as the narrative unfolds.

There are times, to be sure, when Zeno seems to grasp that life isn't merely feints and games, that subterfuge and dark motivation aren't the whole of human transaction. Yet he always retreats back into his extravagant, consoling fantasies. Perhaps that's why Svevo's book still has the power to discomfit: Zeno's ingenious whitewashing of an indifferent world feels alarmingly like the fictions we tell ourselves on a daily basis. --Ben Guterson

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