Zéno

On the enlightened recommendation of James Joyce, who had been Italo Svevo’s English teacher in Trieste, Benjamin Crémieux and Valéry Larbaud introduced this giant of Italian letters to the French public. A “hyperconscious” figure endowed with humor, Svevo was also a pessimistic visionary, and these qualities make Zeno a masterly novel that introduces psychoanalysis “into Italian aesthetics” and draws the reader into the introspection of a “misfit” possessed of a mischievous unconscious. Far from mere egotism, the novel culminates in a moralist’s meditation on the essence of evil, resistant to any cure: “It is not psychoanalysis that we need: under the rule of whoever holds the greatest number of machines, diseases and the sick will only grow and multiply. Perhaps we shall return to health thanks to an unprecedented catastrophe brought about by machines. […] There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, having reverted to the state of a nebula, will wander through the heavens, purged of parasites and disease.” One understands why this novel, unjustly overshadowed and little known, holds up a mirror to every reader and to every conscience horrified by the destructive powers of the atom.

As new.