The Sentimental Education of Zeno

The long section A Business Partnership in Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, as I noted in yesterday's post, is extremely funny - two rich guys who've never worked a day in their lives setting up a business, which is a study in incompetence and indifference and a financial catastrophe waiting to happen - but as the section develops the mood becomes ever darker and more sorrowful - it's really quite a beautiful section and could (almost) stand alone as a novella: as the section moves along, there's a very beautiful passage in which Guido takes Zeno and the two other office mates on a late-night fishing excursion, and Zeno realizes that he likes Guido very much, a real moment of sweetness and tenderness in this book filled with so much agony. But that sweet feeling cannot endure: as the firm heads toward its inevitable ruin, Guido retreats from Zeno and from his family, and there's great pressure on Zeno to try to keep the firm alive. Meanwhile, Guido's wife, Ada, whom Zeno had loved in his youth, becomes seriously ill with Graves Disease. This occasions a very sorrowful scene in which Ada realizes Zeno is a good man, a better man than her more dashing and attractive husband, and she apologizes for making him suffer years ago. Zeno, in his fashion, imagines that Ada is in love with him (he misses the point of course) - but he no longer loves her - she is old and ill, has lost her beauty. This theme of youthful longing after an unattainable woman, who later loses her beauty and begs for help, was at the heart of Flaubert's great Sentimental Education; here in Zeno, the theme is more brusque and less romantic, as Zeno is so easily wounded and so temperamental. This section of the novel, though, is a magnificent account of a disastrous business ruined by incompetence and arrogance - as well as a family drama and a sorrowful love story. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, over the course of his lengthy confessions, Zeno is growing and maturing, beginning to think about others and beginning to understand that the world does not revolve around the axis of his feelings.