Editing Italo Svevo (section)

== ''Zeno's Conscience'' ==
In 1923 Italo Svevo published the psychological novel ''[[Zeno's Conscience|La Coscienza di Zeno]]''. The work, showing the author's interest in the theories of [[Sigmund Freud]], is written in the form of the memoirs of Zeno Cosini, who writes them at the insistence of his [[psychoanalyst]].<ref name="Treccani"/> Svevo's novel received almost no attention from Italian readers and critics at the time.<ref name="Treccani"/>
[[File:ItaloSvevo statue 10.jpg|thumb|Italo Svevo statue in front of the Public Library in Trieste]]
The work might have disappeared altogether if it were not for the efforts of [[James Joyce]]. Joyce had met Svevo in 1907, when Joyce tutored him in English, while working for [[Berlitz Corporation|Berlitz]] in [[Trieste]].<ref name="Spectator"/> Joyce read Svevo's earlier novels, ''[[Una Vita]]'' and ''[[Senilità]]''.<ref name="Spectator"/>

Joyce championed ''Zeno's Conscience'', helping to have it translated into French and then published in [[Paris]], where critics praised it extravagantly.<ref name="Spectator"/> That led Italian critics, including [[Eugenio Montale]], to discover it.<ref name="Treccani"/> Zeno Cosini, the book's hero and [[unreliable narrator]], mirrored Svevo himself, being a businessman fascinated by Freudian theory.<ref name="Treccani"/> Svevo was also a model for [[Leopold Bloom]], the protagonist of Joyce's seminal novel ''[[Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses]]''.<ref name=Ellman>{{cite book |last=Ellmann |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Ellmann |title=James Joyce |url=https://archive.org/details/jamesjoyce00rich |url-access=registration |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1982 |location=New York |pages=[https://archive.org/details/jamesjoyce00rich/page/502 502–04] |isbn=0-19-503103-2}}</ref>

''Zeno's Conscience'' never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which rarely left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Svevo employed often sardonic wit in his observations of Trieste and, in particular, of his hero, an indifferent man, who cheats on his wife, lies to his psychoanalyst, and is trying to explain himself to his [[psychoanalyst]], by revisiting his memories.<ref name="Treccani"/>
[[File:Ettore Schmitz alias Italo Svevo 1861-1928 Writer lived here 1903-1913.jpg|thumb|Blue plaque at 67 Charlton Church Lane, Charlton, London SE7 7AB, London Borough of Greenwich]]
There is a final connection between Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought [[psychoanalysis]], he said, in order to discover why he was addicted to [[nicotine]]. As Svevo reveals in his memoirs, each time he had given up smoking, with the iron resolve that this would be the "''ultima sigaretta!!''", he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. That feeling was, however, so strong that he found smoking irresistible, if only so that he could stop smoking again, in order to experience that thrill once more.