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Zeno’s Conscience is fantastic. It’s also very strange. The first and third chapters are ferociously funny, some of the funniest prose I’ve ever read—if nothing else, the casual reader could fly through the first chapter, which hilariously dissects the protagonists addiction to cigarettes and his countless attempts to quit. Yet there’s an intense sadness and despair in other places. (It’s been said that Zeno is almost a prototype for Woody Allen’s cinematic schlemiel persona. I would add that there’s a healthy dose of “Interiors�� amongst the “Sleeper�� slapstick and “Manhattan�� angst.) The pacing is also uneven. There is no plot to speak of and therefore no thrust—after the first three chapters, the book seems to slow down almost to a crawl. However, what keeps you going in spite of this aimlessness is both the humor and the psychological insight into the characters.

What makes this book so psychologically profound is that rather than just revealing the minutiae of how we behave, with precision that reminds one of the accomplishments of authors like Tolstoy or Chekhov, Svevo goes further and shows how these behaviors are concealed and interpreted by people. The book is told in first-person narration but by taking the form of confessions to a psycho-analyst, the accuracy of the biography falters and the text becomes riddled with lies.

These aren’t just your ordinary, bold-faced lies. These are the subtle, familiar lies, the lies we tell ourselves to feel better about who we are, to justify our actions, to give us the confidence to go through things for which we wouldn’t ordinarily have the strength, to convince ourselves we feel the opposite of how we really feel. And while Zeno admits to lying quite often, he also does not realize that he’s lying more than he thinks he is. He can’t help it. He is a weak, weak character constantly thwarted by his lack of will and curious inclination to self-sabotage—in everything he attempts to do, he almost always achieves the opposite result, not because of outside influences but because of his very own actions. Yet despite Zeno’s farcical extremes, he appears simultaneously as a very real person. Who hasn’t visualized goals to the point where they seem somehow already accomplished yet fails miserably to achieve them in the face of reality? And who wouldn’t try to protect his ego from a constant assault of failures and unrequited desires by fudging the truth slightly? Zeno is a petty, neurotic bourgeois idiot but his foibles are familiar.

I would say that this book should be more popular—but actually it is. In Italy, this book is required reading in some schools. Yet the unorthodox genre, lack of plot, and length are legitimate obstacles to a more widespread audience. If Svevo had trimmed about a hundred pages from the latter half of the book, his masterpiece now might be as popular and well-known in America as Ulysses, whose main character, Leopold Bloom, was perhaps inspired by a certain Italian Jew whom Joyce tutored while visiting the Austrian town of Trieste.

Those last two conjectures can be left to the Svevo scholars. For the readers, there are the comic pleasures and unsettling truths of Zeno’s Conscience.