La coscienzia de Zeno

 I'm about half way through the Svevo novel. The neurotic narrator is a bit insufferable. There is a long chapter on quitting (not quitting) smoking, another on the death of his father, another on his courtship and wedding; now I am on a chapter on his early married life. The Italian is easy enough, but I am just not a good fiction reader. I get impatient. The novel is supposed to be psychoanalytic: the narrator writes at the insistence of his therapist. For all that, there is not a great amount of self-knowledge, at least in the way I define self-knowledge. His malattia always seems arbitrary. 

Zeno is in love with Ada; she is the only member of the family who doesn't like him. He is a comic figure and she is serious. Finally, when he asks her to marry him, she says no. Then he proposes to the sister; she also says no. Then, the same night, he proposes to the third sister, Augusta, who is already in love with him. Another foppish man marries Ada.