Description: First written in Italian in 1923 and hailed as the year's best novel, "Zeno's Conscience" is a pioneering work of literature that reveals -- through an absorbing, comical, and deeply sympathetic look at a conscience-stricken man and his sometimes extravagant fantasies -- our own self-deluding tendencies. "Zeno" combines ironical asides with an assured stream-of-consciousness narrative in a work that, in straddling modernism and postmodernism, came to redefine the tradition of the first-person novel.

With remarkable psychological insight, Italo Svevo tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man whose penchant for obsessive introspection makes him incapable of living, except on a mental level. As a form of therapy his doctor advises him to write his memoirs; in doing so, Zeno reconstructs and ultimately reshapes the events of his life into a palatable reality for himself -- a reality, however, founded upon compromise and rationalization. A representative psychoanalytic novel, "Zeno" is at once a comedy of errors, a neurotic testimonial, and a surpassingly articulate illumination of human fixations, motivations, and consolations. With its uncommon insight into the human condition, achieved with an endearing lightheartedness, it has transcended its historical specificity to rank among the 20th century's classics of world literature.

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