ZENO'S CONSCIENCE

Zeno Corsini's psychiatrist has encouraged him to write about his thoughts and feelings. Narrator Sean Barrett captures all the inwardness and intimacy of that writing in his admirable performance of this modernist classic. His subtly inflected accent gives a continental nuance to his speech, perhaps reflecting the dialect of Zeno's native Trieste. Barrett's voice is charcoal gray in tone and pleasantly gravelly, his expression well suited to the sense and feel of the character: weak, amiable, self-deluding, self-justifying, undependable, venal. Barrett takes him at his own, perhaps dishonest, estimation, recounting his stories, his self-examinations, and his long monologues seriously--but not too seriously. He delivers Zeno's history of himself as Zeno might in a subtle and skilled performance of this ambiguous fiction. W.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2022]