Zeno's Conscience Italo Svevo, translated by William Weaver Everyman's Library, 437pp, £12.99 ISBN 1857152492

Even in Italy, according to the sage of Trieste, Claudio Magris, Italo Svevo is still little known. I have often seen Italians reading Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno on trains and in cafes; but Magris's observation would certainly apply to Britain. In fact, in this country, his words would be sharpened with understatement: La coscienza, once available in English as The Confessions of Zeno, has been out of print for at least 15 years. So the new Everyman edition is a reason for celebration.

What did Svevo have? Well, he wrote not with his head, but with his hand - by which I mean that he created, wrote and rewrote with an absence of artifice, in apparently total ignorance of the instrumentation of novel-writing. La coscienza di Zeno, a "confession" in the form of a patient's statement to his psychoanalyst, is the first and funniest of the great battles between literature and psychoanalysis for the right to define the importance of the human act.

Svevo, whose real name was Ettore Schmitz (1861-1928), reflecting his mixed German, Jewish and Italian heritage, was from the cosmopolitan port of Trieste - neither Austro-Hungarian nor fully Latin - and his critics at first dismissed him for writing "shop Italian". Perversely, it was partly the simplicity of Svevo's Italian that earned him a reputation as a difficult author, because he hid his intentions so well that readers tended not to notice that they were reading something rather deep. In dividing the novel into chapters that each dealt with a conflict, and by restating conflict as muddle - Zeno's cigarette addiction, the death of his father, his marriage - he succeeded in never being explicit.

His grasp of aphorism was strong and, although a lover of digressions, Zeno is capable of wonderful succinctness. He begins the story of his marriage with the words: "In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I." With the result that we are instantly reminded of our own ridiculous ambitions, while simultaneously consoled that it is only Zeno's that will go under the microscope.

Zeno is a charming creation, humble and vain, frank and prevaricating, admiring and jealous of those who appear to manage life better than he does. About affairs of the heart, he writes: "Guido, I knew for a fact, would on the contrary enjoy Carmen without giving Ada a thought. In his carefree spirit, two women were no more than enough." Poor Zeno is always horribly distracted in his dreams of Ada, in business with Guido, in marriage to Augusta, in lust with his own mistress, Carla, and in his understandable desire to leave behind some small trace of himself. At every moment, his mind is trying to make his life have the shape of art; at every step, he is uncomfortably, and comically, experiencing that it has no shape. Zeno struggles and fails, but it is Guido who is the amateur in life, an incurable egotist, unfaithful husband, atrocious businessman and eventual suicide. The expert is Zeno, who knows that our virtues go unnoticed and our loves unanswered.

Zeno has lost little of his comedy or his revealing depths in the 78 years since he first appeared. The comedy of compassion is not very modish now, but there is one matter in which he excels even in the confessional atmosphere of today: his readiness to admit to every streak of meanness and vanity in the cause of honesty. Thus, in mid-affair with Carla, Zeno thinks not of his wife, but his own mortality: "Fear of ageing never abandoned me thereafter, I lived always with the fear of passing my wife on to another man. The fear was not mitigated when I was unfaithful to her, nor was it increased by the thought of losing [Carla] in the same way."

The Everyman's Library, which is beginning to assume very sensitively the custody of our European fictional heritage that Penguin long ago abandoned, has rendered another significant service in putting Zeno back on the shelves. William Weaver's new translation comes with a new title. Translators often want to retranslate titles, for understandable reasons, and translations age, as Weaver says in his sympathetic introduction - but after a couple of weeks of considering the problem, I think the substitution of "conscience" for "confessions" is not so felicitous. (The Italian has the double meaning of "conscience" and "consciousness", and Weaver reaches back to Shakespeare - a bit far, in my view, for such a modern book - to point out that English conscience once meant consciousness, too.)

Weaver, who has translated Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Luigi Pirandello, would seem an inspired choice for a new translation of Svevo. I found the result very slightly less funny than Beryl de Zoete's 1930 version, which captures both Zeno's striving for verbal accuracy about his state, and its Buster Keaton-like effect. But I am so grateful to have Svevo's masterpiece back in print that I will stop my carping there. If you have never read Zeno, do so as soon as you can. He is beautiful and important because he is not only funny, but romantic, in his struggle with life's muddle. Possibly the strangest thing about the novel, from a 21st-century perspective, is that this scourge of analysts ends up psychoanalysing himself - which many of today's analysts would agree is the best available outcome.

Julian Evans's series The Romantic Road, on the literatures of Europe, is broadcast monthly on BBC Radio 3

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