Italian · Advanced
Read La coscienza di Zeno in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: Zeno's Conscience
Italo Svevo · 1923
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About the book
La coscienza di Zeno by Italo Svevo was first published in 1923. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 141,700 words.
His last cigarette. Really, truly the last one. Again.
Zeno Cosini, a wealthy, idle and endlessly self-deceiving businessman from Trieste, has gone into psychoanalysis. His doctor asks him to write down his memories, and Zeno obliges with a confession that is funny, sly and never quite reliable. Now, out of spite, the doctor has decided to publish it.
Zeno tells of his countless attempts to quit smoking, of his difficult father, and of how he set out to marry the beautiful Ada Malfenti but somehow ended up engaged to her sister. He goes on to recount his marriage, a love affair and a disastrous business partnership, always convinced that he is the sick one while everyone else is healthy.
Italo Svevo's masterpiece, championed by his friend James Joyce, is one of the great modernist novels. Ironic and deeply human, Zeno's Conscience is a standard text in Italian schools and a delight to read.
- Author
- Italo Svevo
- First published
- 1923
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 141,700 words
How it opens
Vedere la mia infanzia? Piú di dieci lustri me ne separano e i miei occhi presbiti forse potrebbero arrivarci se la luce che ancora ne riverbera non fosse tagliata da ostacoli d’ogni genere, vere alte montagne: i miei anni e qualche mia ora.
Il dottore mi raccomandò di non ostinarmi a guardare tanto lontano. Anche le cose recenti sono preziose per essi e sopra tutto le immaginazioni e i sogni della notte prima.
Reading La coscienza di Zeno in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Italian. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Italian book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
