"Zeno's conscience" by Italo Svevo (Penguin, 2022)

First published in 1923. The author was Ettore Schmitz - his father was a German Jew. Ettore was expected to join his father's glassware business but he liked literature. When his father's business failed, Ettore worked in a bank. He married into a successful family (with an underwater paint business), accepted by them as quirky and interesting. He took English lessons from James Joyce. They liked each other's work. Some of Bloom's Jewish details come from Svevo. Thanks to Joyce, Eliot and Montale found out about "La coscienza di Zeno". Svevo became famous in literary circles. He wrote in an Italian that people found clumsy - it was his third language.

In the Preface it says "I am the doctor occasionally mentioned in this story, in unflattering terms. Anyone familiar with psychoanalysis knows how to assess the patient's obvious hostility towards me ... I am publishing them in revenge, and I hope he is displeased. I want him to know, however, that I am prepared to share with him the lavish profits I expect to make from this publication, on condition that he resume his treatment"

It's set in Trieste. Zeno's first-person PoV. The sections are -

• "Smoke" - He kept having "his last cigarette". He went into a clinic, drank, then escaped - thinking that the doctor was having an affair with his wife.
• "My Father's Death" - His mother died with he was 15. His father, a widower, died in 1890. They had little in common. There was little love, though the death affected the narrator greatly
• "The Story of My Marriage" - He befriended a family with 4 daughters whose names start with "A". The father, a businessman, was unfaithful - the wife knew. The narrator decided at 30 that he should marry, and decided rather arbitrarily that he'd marry Ada, the person in the family who'd shown the least interest in him. He obsessed about her, decided that it's her or nobody. "It is said, indeed, that the dying, in their final fever, review their whole lives. My past now gripped me with the violence of a last farewell because I had the feeling I was moving far away from it". He met his rival, Guido, who's handsome and talented. He'd been talking to (ugly?) Augusta as a way to stay close to Ada, but rebuffed by Ada, he immediately asked Augusta to marry him. She'd liked him from the start.
• "Wife and Mistress" - He got used to married life, liking decisions being made for him. He found a mistress, Carla, a poor singer. "I had wept so over my infidelity before committing it, that it should conceivably have been easy to avoid it". At a family gathering he messed up the reporting of a friend's death. "Wine ... reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more of less recent period one has toyed with and then forgotten". After a year or two, Carla's proposed to by her song teacher and breaks up with Zeno. Augusta and Zeno have a daughter, Antonia, who comes to look like Ada.
• "The Story of a Business Partnership" - Zeno goes into business with Guido, who has a rich South American father. They start with some bad deals. Guido employs Carmen - because Guido wants her as a mistress? Ada has twins. She has to go to a sanatorium. She returns, looking ugly. Zeno tries to find a job elsewhere for Carmen. Guido pretends to attempt suicide. He gets a promise of money from Ada to prop up the firm. Augusta has a 2nd child, Alfio. When the company's about to go bust, Guido gambles in stocks, does well, then loses it all. He expects Zeno and Ada to help bail him out. He overdoses again - another fake attempt. This time, partly because it was raining, doctors arrive too late. Zeno misses the funeral because he was trying to recoup the money. Ada and her children go to live with her in-laws in South America.
• "Psychoanalysis" - It's 1915. War. He's stopped therapy. The therapist said it was Oedipal complex and that he was cured. However the narrator had invented the things he'd told the therapist with emotion. He wants the manuscript of "confessions" back from the therapist. He's now going to set the story straight. On p.405 we learn he had a brother, a year younger than he (or was it just a dream?). The narrator recounts dream about his early years. The narrator said that Zeno's smoking was to do with his father. He has a break in the countryside. He chats up a peasant girl. He meets German soldiers, complaining to them when they block his walk. He believes that business has cured him - since war broke out he has been buying.

There's a disconnect between emotion, intellect, and the body. Reasoning can generate fake emotion, and visa versa. Illness is a reminder of death; it can be psychosomatic (caused by emotion); it can be faked to attract sympathy (caused by intellect).