Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Triest in Trieste

An amazing tour de force of sustained irony, sending up everything from male feelings of superiority to psychoanalysis.

It is, I suppose, never easy being a successful businessman; or for that matter even an unsuccessful one. Dealing with the vagaries of commercial life on top of the usual quanta of personal tensions is bound to produce certain idiosyncrasies and, well, 'tics' in a person of taste and discernment. Just look at Donald Trump.

What better way to expiate these little personality defects than a sort of literary therapy? Write it all down so it becomes visible, conscious, and therefore subject to the will. Again, let Trump be our guide.

Ah, if it were only that straightforward. One's life is just so....intractable, implacable. One feels like one is in the midst of a more or less permanent sigh. Without Twitter it was of course infeasible to be fully virile in Trieste of the 1920's And that's not even considering the possibility of man-flu.

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