Confessions of Zeno

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"The cult classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, Confessions of Zeno is a miracle of psychological realism from one of the most important figures in modern Italian literary history. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce, Musil, Proust and Kafka. When the vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno's account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, Confessions of Zeno is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to the joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century."-- Amazon.com