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Many books are famous for one thing � what’s the first thing anyone thinks of when remembering Proust’s 3000 page masterpiece? Oh yes, that’s the one where the guy dunks a madeleine in his tea. What about the 1000 page Don Quixote? Yeah, old crazy guy fights with a windmill. And Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet? Oh, wait, I got this � to be or not to be. This goes for music too � what do people think of when they think of Beethoven? Da da da DAAH.

So sometimes Zeno’s Conscience is remembered as the one where the guy tries to quit smoking and fails miserably. Yes, that’s the first 30 pages. The next 410 pages are not much about smoking.

This is a novel that starts off really well, great comedy about smoking (yes!), looking after old cranky people, and a long section on getting married to the wrong sister. All excellent. But then this novel develops a leak, and the balloon starts slowing sinking, and even fans of Italo Svevo might concede that the section called “The Story of a Business Partnership� (134 pages) could be chopped without anyone crying their eyes out.

Here is my favourite joke in this comical book. Zeno has been pouring out his life story to a psychoanalyst, including his lustful desire for his wife’s two lovely sisters, and he is becoming increasingly convinced that psychoanalysis is total bollocks. Referring to his analyst, he says

I believe that he is the only one in this world who, hearing I wanted to go to bed with two beautiful women, would ask himself : Now let’s see why this man wants to go to bed with them.

But this book is stuffed with sly observations :

“You are my first lover,� she went on to say, “and I hope you will go on loving me.�
That information, that I was her first lover, a designation implying a possible second one, did not move me greatly. � Softly I murmured in her ear : “You’re my first lover…since my marriage.�

But also this book is stuffed with pages of slightly off-kilter waffling by Zeno, who can be located on the literary map somewhere equidistant between Oblomov and Charles Pooter in Diary of a Nobody. He rambles and rambles. And loses track of what he's talking about. Which sometimes isn't worth bothering with. Frankly, between you, me and the gatepost, Zeno Cosini can be a bit of a conceited bore.

I think if you cut the boring section completely out, and trim the rest down to a lean 280 pages, you have a splendid 4 star comedy. Alas, somehow, they never consulted me in 1923.