Italian Tycoon's Book

CONFESSIONS OF ZENO--Italo Svevo--Knopf ($3). Few authors would dare inflict on their readers such a queer bird as Zeno. Unclassifiable in any pigeonhole of good citizenry or good character, he is an eccentric fellow altogether, disliked even by his psychoanalyst. The plan of the book is simple but ingenious: Zeno's doctor persuades him to write his auto-biography as an exercise in analysis: when Zeno breaks with him before the treatment is complete, the doctor, in revenge, publishes Zeno's confessions:

Zeno Cosini, only child of a rich Trieste merchant, very early in his boyhood be came so preoccupied with introspection that he was soon a hypochondriac. A cigaret-smoker almost from infancy, he was constantly vowing to stop smoking. He wrote in his diary, on the walls of his room, the date on which he would smoke his last cigaret. The dates were soon in numerable. When his parents died. Zeno came into a fortune. He played with busi ness, gambled on the stock exchange. There he met shrewd, blunt Malfenti, who took a fancy to him, took him home to meet Signora Malfenti and his four daughters. Zeno instantly fell in love with the most beautiful, but he had such a genius for putting his foot in it and re fusing to realize it that he only made her dislike him. When she refused him he immediately proposed to the next-best-looking, who gently handed him on to the plain Augusta. In pity for Augusta, who adored him, he married her. Their marriage turned out strangely well, though Zeno loved his wife most when he was with his mistress. When he went into business with his brother-in-law they lost half their capital the first year. But Zeno. who could do nothing from the right motive, got the bad habit of work, found he could not keep himself away from the office. Eventually he dropped his psychoanalytic treatment because business had cured him.

The Author. The late great Italo Svevo's real name was Ettore Schmitz. Like his hero, Schmitz was a Trieste businessman--millionaire head of a shipping firm--who wrote in his spare time. In 1912 he met Author James Joyce, who is said to have encouraged him to write this book, which he did when the War suspended his business. When Confessions of Zeno appeared (1923) it had an immediate succes d'estime throughout Europe. In 1928 Schmitz, aged 67, was killed in a motor accident in Italy. Other books: Una Vita, Senilita.

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