Rereading "Zeno's Conscience"

A great book is always ahead of its time, like summer cherries that arrive in the markets early and aren't as sweet as advertised but are nonetheless more fun to eat–livelier, quirky from page to page, one cherry more surprising than the next–so that a rereading provokes a series of new discoveries the author may or may not have intended.

Rereading a good book, the writer leaves the reader much more to his or her own devices. The rereader already knows the contours of the story, and is no longer confined to a plot, an arc, character development or any or those other constricting narrative tricks the writer used to capture the reader in the first place. Free at last to savor the disjunctive under-voice, the heart and soul of all great fiction, the rereader is better able to hear those whispers of genius he or she couldn't possibly hear during a first reading.

Twenty years ago I started a list, not of the 100 Books That I Must Read Before I Die, but of The 100 Books I Want to Reread Before I Die. "Huck Finn" was first on that list; Stendahl's "The Red and the Black" ; Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents"; Wallace Stevens' first book of poems, "Harmonium";
Samuel Beckett's last three short novels; and "Tristram Shandy" have all earned places as well. I now unreservedly add "Zeno's Conscience" by Italo Svevo, having reread it for the third time, having missed language, like the language I'm adding below, on the first and second reading:

"You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide." (p .91)

Life's no bowl of cherries, and the final chapter of "Zeno's Conscience" depicts the downside and the benefit of being prescient. The book is a masterpiece, one of the very best cherries in the bowl.