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PARTISAN REVIEW
household, intent upon marrying the pretty daughter, but marries instead
the ugly one who makes him a good wife. (It doesn't make any difference
which daughter he marries since he is only abstractly in need of a wife.
And the wrong marriage is really the right one, because the situation
allows
him
to pretend that he is still in love with the pretty daughter
who rejected him.) His frantic sexuality grows upon idleness and leads
him to a mistress, Carla, who is badly in need of money. Zeno has money
but his ironic sense of finance and love prevents him from offering it to
his mistress
naturally
and she is forced into a marriage which separates
them.
The book, superficially a medical account, is really a fine novel
because Zeno does not analyze himself in a vacuum, but always in terms
of each situation. He is not presented as a tragic figure mimicking some
ancient and mythical fixation, but as an everyday neurotic who goes
to his in-laws for dinner and bears children who make no changes at all
in his life. One of the best sections is .called "A Business Partnership."
This adventure is high comedy because Zeno's temperament is possible
only to the clumsy, unambitious son of a rich man ; but business has a
fascination for zeno who has lived from its fruits but does not under–
stand it. He loves the doors marked "private" and delights in selling a
few old packing boxes or in buying the office furniture. "But when are
you going to begin to make money?" his wife asks, and Zeno responds
wittily by businesslike poses of "taking stock of the market." The business
is a failure because Zeno's brother-in-law with whom he has entered
into a partnership is an extrovert who begins to play the market and
get~
so much in debt he has to commit suicide.
There is a problem about the interpretation of
The Confessions of
.(eno.
In the end Zeno announces himself cured, not by psychoanalysis,
but by his recognition that pain and love are essential afflictions of man–
kind. In an epilogue he seems to offer a theoretical condemnation of
psychoanalysis by doubting the possibility of perfect health. However,
the prologue is a grimly triumphant note by the analyst who says that
Zeno in attacking psychoanalysis has merely proved his need of it. This
irony leaves us just about where we are today; both the patient and
the doctor are covered.
· The quality of Svevo's book is utterly unlike the second-rate, Gothic,
psychoanalytical fiction we are used to these days. Svevo, perhaps because
he came to psychoanalysis without our accumulated glibness, has had the
genius to preserve the commonplace and trivial in the lives of neurotics.
His novel is much gayer than the others of its type and it is also, in the
end, much more pessimistic and disturbing.
Not having read anything by Vercors I found myself expecting
much more than I received from his new volume of sht9rt stories. Ver-
