Product Description
Dino is approaching middle age, and he is consumed with boredom — not just a lack of interest in life, but also a feeling of profound disconnection with the world at large. A painter, he has given up his art to live from day to day. Then he meets Cecilia, a beautiful, unabashedly sexual, strangely impassive teenage model who becomes his mistress. But as she eludes his increasingly frantic efforts to take control of her, body and mind — even to buy her if necessary — his own life spins dangerously out of control. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

La Noia
Only the bourgeois or wealthy experience the privilege of boredom. Or, this state is arguably a postmodern condition. Moravia defines 'la noia' as a lack of connectedness to things, hence reality. Such ennui is explored sexually, through a myriad of disconnectedness, desperation, obsession and possession. While there is an end to this study, there is no definitive conclusion: Connection to reality remains tenuous and ambiguous. A fine contribution to existential examination.

Preoccupied With Boredom
It's hard to live the bohemain life of the starving artist when you're mother is loaded with money and even if you're able to break away, you're still completely talentless.

This is the story of Dino,a man emotionally and physically detatched from all life has to offer. Pretending, even trying to fool himself, that he doesn't need his mother to live, he tries to live as an artist and with no inspiration or drive he stares into a blank canvas, perhaps a metaphor for his life.

You would think that he is just waiting for the lifestyle he craves to be handed to him as everything else is handed to him, that his obsession with boredom is simply just an excuse, until Cecilia enters the story.

Completely on the opposite end of the spectrum, Cecilia lives in poverty with an ill father, Cecilia cannot be conquered by Dino by way of boredom. He wants to be the user, to use her body and her emotions and detatch himself from her, but is curious to find she is also as equally detatched from the world, which leads Dino into a dangerous spiral to make her feel at least something for him. Not entirely out of love as much asa game to make the other feel something first, a game that he seems to be playing all by himself.

This misses one star because I'm not entirely sure if I even liked the story, but the writing was good and kept drawing me back to the book. This is a book worth checking out, perhaps at your local library.

Uniquely humorous
This novel was the greatest birthday gift given to me by my sister.Moravia is the European Bellow.This is a hypnotic novel.It is funny, sometimes despite being tragic, and sometimes because it is tragic.The dialogue especially about furniture is hilarious.After this, read Contempt.

Strange.......disturbing......different
"Boredom" was my first encounter with Italian neorealism...the theory that holds "consciousness does not constitute reality". In other words, reality is extramental, the way we perceive objects and people, and the relationship we develop with them, does not change the reality of these objects or people. As one website explained, "a man remains the same man, even though he becomes an uncle (exteriority of relationship). Knowledge is nothing other than an external relationship; its nature consists in making an object present to a subject. But in this relationship both object and subject remain what they were." So, basically, a cup is just a cup regardless of the purpose for which I use it. It stands in and of its own. Everything stands in and of its own. But our relationship to things is just our perception, our consciousness, it is not reality itself. We are outside of reality.

We see the crucial significance of this philosophy in Moravia's "Boredom." The novel is rather an unusual one....it is a disturbing psychological study.It traces the inner thoughts and emotions of Dino, the painter who suffers "artistic sterility from boredom." Here, it is important to realise what boredom means for Dino. Boredom is more than just "ennui"...it is his inability to develop a relationship to the world around him. He feels a complete emptiness, apathy, disconnection with the world at large. He suffers from what we would term in this modern day and age a kind of depression, the kind that is so acute that it does not manifest itself in sadness, but rather in a complete indifference to life. The novel barely has a plot. In fact, there are only a handful of interacting characters in the book. Most of the novel takes place in the protagonist's head, as we witness his growing obsession with a bizarely amoral and impassive young model.

Everything in "Boredom" is described in such a cold, detached, neorealist manner. Sex, which is a core concern in the book, is acted out with the same cold automatism as with picking up a glass of water or blinking your eyes. This is one thing which makes the novel quite fascinating. It would seem to a regular person, for example, that there could not possibly exist a human being as elusive and as devoid of emotions as Cecilia, the sexual machine, and yet Dino goes to such lengths to describe her, and describe his dead-pan conversations with her, that we come to believe she is real. And indeed we come to feel his suffering as he struggles to possess her, but fails over and over again. It is a disturbing novel, and one can not help but feel pity for Dino's plummet into desperation. There will be many moments of recognition in the book as we recall the times we ourselves have fallen victim to weakness, to temptation, and perhaps even to quasi-obsession.

I definitely think this novel is worth picking up, if only for its eccentricity. It is is so cold, so realist, so bland, that it is fascinating. And it will touch you more than you think. It will stay with you, and it will leave you touched. N.B: This novel is sometimes published under another name..."The Empty Canvas."

STRANDED
a young man muse destroys him A very strange girl enters the consciousness of the protagonist a self professed failed painter, i cant recall his name,nor the girls, cause the book is buried somewhere anywhere lost like OUR main characature; with too much time on his hand, this semmingly most inteligent of narators PONDERS HIS PREDICAMENT. he seems to be stranded, an outsider looking in so self absorbed in inteligent reflection,, very much like an author thinker he observes he comments on cynically critically, yet caring deeply about he world about him. mostly he obsesses about his powerlessness, his failure his hoplessness and its consequence BOREDOM, so he surmises, hes much too confused by the ordinary of the real,ALSO.hE LETS THE EVERYDAY IN,and it distracts him GREATLY. AT FIRST ITS HIS CONSTANT NEED FOR MORE MONEY, AND THEN ITS HIS MOTHER WHO PROVIDES IT. he hates the relationship between his needs which are selfish and produce guilt and his GREAT love for his mother WHICH IS DIVINE.so its a descenging rubic cube like set of possibilities presented INTERNALY, BUT outward, out the window he seeDOES HE WISH TO DISTURB? HES ALREADY GOING KNOWHERE FAST, why not choose to pursue LUST, NOT just AS A VOYEOUR. ... Read more

Product Description
With the reissue of several Alberto Moravia novels, English speakers are discovering this peerless Italian writer. In The Time of Indifference, Moravia's stunning first novel, a bourgeois Roman family succumbs to decadence and self-obsession. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Existential Soap Opera
As my review title indicates, I think of this novel as a an existential soap opera. It has tawdry romances, dramas, intrigues, centering mostly around shallow characters with predictable emotions. But through the main character, Michele, Moravia explores contemporary trends in modern Western culture, society, and thought.

So this book is both a pleasantly engaging page-turner and a pleasantly engaging intellectual treat. It's still not as good as Moravia's later works, particularly Boredom and The Conformist, in sexiness, intelligence, or originality. But I still highly recommend it.

...
I am a big fan of Moravia, but I consider this to be one of his worst novels. There are only 5 characters and the novel is 300+ pages long, which makes reading it sort of a bore. Not a complete failure, worthy of one star, but seems to be far inferior to everything else written by the author.

Early Work of a Great Writer
Five people of the Roman middle class interact in this novel. Mariagrazia Ardengo, the mother, will not give up her pretensions though financially ruined and without hope for the future. She has two children, both in their twenties. Carla, who is bored with her present life, wants to change it drastically and overnight. Michele, who shows the indifference of the book's title, cannot get aroused by anything or anybody. Lisa, the mother's friend, has sunk to the level of a fat, penniless tramp, searches desperately for somebody to love her - or to at least pretend it. And then there is Leo. Leo used to be the lover of Lisa, until Mariagrazia took him away from her. Leo is the source of their financial ruin. Leo has money. Leo wants something fresher, younger, unspoiled. Leo goes after Carla. And he succeeds. After Mariagrazia and Lisa spend their time fighting over Leo, they are now left out in the cold. Michele cannot be touched by any of this but hopes that, one of these days, he can get a real life.

Moravia started on this book when he was eighteen and it was published in 1929 when he was twenty-one. He did not have the life experience he so stunningly shows in his later work. I get the impression that he studied too much of the French literature of those times and tried to follow it. That makes this novel less than perfect and somewhat outdated. ... Read more

Product Description
Secrecy and silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist. He's a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, and the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But his perfect life becomes a nightmare when he's ordered to kill his former professor to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state. When he also falls in love with a strange woman, a chain of events occur whose repercussions none could foresee. First published in 1951, The Conformist equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychosexual life of a man for whom conformity becomes an obsession after a traumatic experience in his youth. In 1970, director Bernardo Bertolucci turned Moravia's classic into an acclaimed film starring Jean-Louis Tritignant. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

One of several brilliant novels by Moravia
The Conformist is a psychologically complex novelistic study of an Italian fascist, although not necessarily a typical fascist, done in an existential style with intense interior monologues and introspection by Alberto Moravia's protagonist, Marcello Clerici.

No doubt Moravia intended Marcello as the conformist, but ironically it is his wife Giulia who nearly always conforms to what is considered normal behavior and who harbors uncritically knee jerk beliefs and opinions formed by church and state.In fact, that is part of the reason he married her.In contrast, Marcello struggles mightily with what he considers his abnormal tendencies.As a child he killed lizards for sport as any boy might, but felt uneasy about the wanton slaughter, and so sought from a friend and his mother some indication that killing lizards was okay.Later he kills a cat, although this is mostly accidental, and as a young teenager shots a homosexual limo driver named Lino.He feels something akin to consternation for these actions, not guilt exactly, but an unease since doing such things is not what he thinks normal people do.

It is his need to be--or at least to appear--"normal" that drives Marcello to conform to society's mores and persuades him to embrace fascism.He only feels really at ease when he sees himself as part of the common herd, on the installment plan, buying ordinary furniture, living in an apartment like a thousand others, having a wife and children, reading the newspapers, going to work, etc.He is not a peasant of course, but an educated functionary in the Italian Secret Service, a man with impeccable manners who seldom says more than is absolutely necessary.

The idea that fascists in general follow the herd and adopt a superficial and uncultured world view is no doubt largely correct, but the essence of fascism is the belief in authoritarian rule, the stratification of society, intolerance of diversity, and a willingness, even an eagerness to use force and violence to obtain such ends.The psychology underlying Moravia's portrait is the idea that Marcello sees in himself the violent and selfish tendencies and so it is only natural that he should adopt a political philosophy that condones and acts out such tendencies.

Moravia treats fascism in the person of Marcello more kindly than I believe he imagined he would when he began the novel, given Moravia's hatred of the fascist movement that seduced much of Europe following the First World War.But this is the necessary consequence of being an objective novelist.In drawing a living, breathing portrait of Marcello, Moravia allows us to see him as a complex person with strengths and weaknesses who deals with the trials of life sometimes in a despicable way, and sometimes, indeed often, in a way that most of us would choose were we in his shoes.Therefore it is impossible not to identify with him to some degree.It is an artifact of Moravia's artistry that we do in fact in the end identify with Marcello and may even realize that in his situation, we too might have embraced fascism or at least tolerated it.

A secondary theme in the novel is that of unrequited love or of desire that is not returned.All of the main characters, Marcello, Lino, Giulia, Quadri and Lina love someone who does not return their love.Marcello briefly falls madly in love with Lina who is a lesbian who despises him.Lina in turn is desperately in love with Giulia who only has eyes for her husband, who does not really love her.The inability of the characters to love the one who loves them is played out partly through a disparity in personality and political belief, and partly through differing sexuality.Lino and his latter-day incarnation in an old British homosexual who drives around Paris picking up indigent young men seldom if ever find their love returned although they might temporarily quench their desire.No one in the novel experiences love both in the giving and the receiving.

Part of Marcello's unease with himself comes from his ambivalent sexuality.He cannot return the intense passion that Giulia feels for him although apparently he does manage to perform his husbandly duties adequately.Perhaps even more to the point, he seems to project a need for the "abnormal" experience.He is twice mistaken for a homosexual, and he falls in love with a homosexual of the opposite sex--thus the "Lino" and the "Lina" of his life.Marcello seems to have a blindness about invert sexuality just as he has a blindness about human morality.He is a man who does not what he thinks is right but what others think is right.He fears his natural impulses.Moravia illustrates this by occasionally having him nearly give into what he feels inside, as in the case of Lina, only to have him realize that to act from his heart is dangerous.

In the final analysis Marcello finds that "the normality that he had sought after with such tenacity for so many years...was now revealed as a purely external thing entirely made up of abnormalities" (quote from near the beginning of Chapter Nineteen).

Moravia (born Alberto Pincherle) is in my opinion one of the great novelists of the 20th century and The Conformist is representative of his best work.Incidentally this was made into a beautiful film by Bernardo Bertolucci while not entirely true to the novel, is nonetheless very much worth seeing.

Good
Interesting novel on Italian fascism during the first half of the 20th century, and the life of a boy/man without many characteristics / emotions. Not an easy read. The end is macabre and sticks to the memory.

Astounding !!True realism embalmed in pre-war surrealism!
I tried watching the movie AFTER the book and I had NO patience with the movie, though directed by a person for whom I have great respect. Moravia is a lyricist and this prose poem of a novel describes some very hard facts of boyhood during fascist times in Italy, and more.The boy becomes a man, a conformist, due to an incredible mistake. And a mistaken mistake at that!Add to this an almost abusive father, who is institutionalized later in the novel, his lovely decadent drug addict mother with her 15 small dogs, and her chauffer, of course.A most harrowing, yet not disbeleivable, ending winds up the novel in just two pages. More from Moravia! Get this book back in print!For the scenes in the Paris clubs, it is alone worth reading this fascinating book.I read it two years ago and it has stayed with me, unlike many of my other favotite novels.This book is incomparable;it is not for the conformists, nor is it for the faint of heart!

Hard to understand at times, but a good novel overall
This novel is fairly difficult to follow at times, but the entire story comes together at the end.You do not have to really be into Moravia's other novels to enjoy this one, but you do have to have some patience.The good parts of the novel are only made better by the rather dull beginning.Read it if you have some free time and you want to get a taste of Moravia's talent.

Movie is better than book
This is one of the few instances that I have found in which the movie version of a novel is better than the novel itself.This is a contrived work through and through, and one can understand why Bertolucci completely changed the ending for the movie.Moravia here displays his utter sentimentality with an admixture of arm-chair psychology that is truly laughable....and this is probably his best novel. ... Read more

Product Description
Life of Moravia documents a free-ranging conversation that took place between celebrated Italian novelist Alberto Moravia and Italian writer and journalist Alain Elkann. The two men discuss Moravia's privileged childhood, his coming of age in Europe between the wars, his youthful affairs, his marriage to novelist Elsa Morante, his work and literary influences, his politics, and his feelings about other writers of his generation. Along the way, the reader comes to understand how the relationship between a writer and society gives rise to the work. Conceived and edited by Moravia, this unconventional autobiography bears the stamp of his erudition, wit, and intellect. ... Read more

Product Description
"A story of love, obsession, and betrayal from "the most important Italian creative writer [of the twentieth] century."—The Times [London]

When Silvio, a rich Italian dilettante, and his beautiful wife agree to move to the country and forgo sex so that he will have the energy to write a successful novel, something is bound to go wrong: Silvio's literary ambitions are far too big for his second-rate talent, and his wife Leda is a passionate woman. Antonio, the local barber who comes every morning to shave Silvio, sparks off this dangerously combustible situation when Leda accuses him of trying to molest her. Silvio obstinately refuses to dismiss him, and the quarrel and its shattering consequences put the couple's love to the test.

Alberto Moravia earned his international reputation with frank, finely-observed stories of love and sex at all levels of society. In this new English translation of Conjugal Love, he explores an imperiled relationship with his customary unadorned style, psychological penetration, and narrative art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A quick concise view of an artists' heart
This tale was a quick and incisive view into one artist's struggle with his ambition, and with love.Despite having every material thing he might wish for, the wealthy protagonist can't seem to produce his ultimate dream: a literary work of art.His attempt at resolving the dilemma provides a deceptive resolution, and ultimately threatens his entire concept of himself.

Moravia's storytelling style is incisive, simple and quite addictive.I literally couldn't put the book down once I started.The plot is simple yet intriguing, and one feels immediately invested with the character's struggle.Some surprising and wise observations about human nature, and our inability to rise above our shortcomings.Interesting that the setting is 1937, because the concerns feel so contemporary.And yet, the end does provide hope.Looking forward to re-reading this, and reading all of Moravia's other works.

Highly recommended read.

It's not about the plot
imho the entire plot, as well as the characters of Leda (the wife) and Antonio (the cuckolding barber), are nothing more than a framework that Moravia constructs on which to hang a portrait of a completely failed man.A man who, in existentialist terms (and it's completely an existentialist novel) has no authenticity, who merely exists but does not live his life.In this case, he examines his life (or better his behavior, not exactly the same thing since behavior is just the observable manifestation of what's going on inside a person) incessantly, 24/7.Instead of living he thinks about living, makes up stories -- excuses -- about his behavior, thinks incessantly about himself but uses all these thoughts and stories in order to avoid ever connecting with himself.Instead of being and living, he tells stories about what he does.In the end, faced with the crisis of his wife's betrayal, he cowardly retreats from any emotion, doesn't even talk about it with his wife (much less the barber), and just continues his inauthentic, empty, meaningless life.

A great novel, wonderfully written, can be read in one evening, and should be enough to scare any reader into abandoning whatever phony acts the reader may be using to fool himself and/or those around him, and instead dive into and thus create a real life for him/herself.

Writing for love
Moravia writes with simplicity and charm, a short and simple story about Silvio, an aspiring writer and his beautiful young wife. When they moved to the countryside in the hope of realising Silvio's writing ambitions, they soon discover that Silvio was unable to satisfy his ambition nor his wife. One might think that that is all there is - a story of failure; but on reflection, it is a thought provoking tale that makes us think about the chasm between dream and reality, and the happiness one seeks and the unpredictable ways we lose our way in process of searching. In the end, one does not condemn, and the epiphany that fell on Silvio also renders us incapable of being judgmental. It partially explains the nature of many relationships, and Moravia summed it up in one curt sentence: "Women love failed men who have renounced all ambition except to make them happy." The rest we have to discover for ourselves. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Black Continent Diary
This is one of the best travel diary ever written--ranking up there with other master travel diaries, such as "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.No other bookhas so deeply searched for the answers and meanings to the questions ofAfrica and its peoples.Everyone knows that Alberto Moravia was Italy'sgreatest writer in the 20th century, writing such novels like A Ghost AtNoon, The Conformist, and The Fancy Dress Party.In this book Moravia hastaken the resposibilty to make sense of the mess that is Africa, of itspolitics, its peoples' struggles, and most importantly, perhaps, of theirobliviousness of it all, except of course, its effect. ... Read more

Product Description
Cesira, a widowed shopkeeper, and Rosetta, her beautiful young daughter, flee south from Rome to escape the German occupation, hoping to wait out the war in Cesira’s native province. But the Allied liberation brings tragedy that changes the women’s lives forever. Out of print for 30 years, this moving portrayal of the anguish and horror of war was the inspiration for the 1960 film for which Sophia Loren won the Oscar for best actress. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A classic of world literature
In its richly detailed, nuanced, and utterly moving portrayal of the experience of everyday people amid the calamity of World War II, Two Women is one of the great war novels of all time and one of the twentieth-century's greatest novels. Had Alberto Moravia gone on to win the Nobel Prize that many say he well deserved, I suspect it would have figured largely in the decision. It is certainly not some vapid "antiwar" work, but one that captures human beings and their suffering in all the poignant, painful, often dumb, and even occasionally comic detail that only the finest literature can evoke. Sure, the protagonist we meet in the novel's opening pages is a typical, rather superficial resident of Rome, but she is presented as anything but a stick figure. Is this not the brilliance of Moravia's venture here? To tell the story of war from the perspective of a person who on the one hand is not the sort to generally reflect upon the meaning of life and war, while on the other hand being clearly moved and, indeed, changed by what she has witnessed and experienced?

Characters can be fallible
I agree much more with the 5-star reviewer than with Persad.Hasn't he ever heard of fallible characters?The narrator is abolutely self-centered, selfish, narrow-minded, and many other things, but she is in many ways a keen observer of the horrific events she moves through.Personally I found it interesting to read about the Liberation through the eyes of this character rather than via some omniscient narrator or distant historian.I find Moravia's unadorned prose attractive and sophisticated.A good book and two very interesting and REAL female characters.

compelling
In this novel Moravia gives the reader a poignant portrayal of the anguish and destruction that is brought about by war. Cesaria and her daughter Rosetta escape from Rome just as the German army is about to enter the city. For months the two women withstand hunger, cold, and humiliation as they await the Allied forces. When liberation comes, it brings unforeseen suffering. On their return to Rome Cesaria and Rosetta are brutally raped by a group of Allied Moroccan soldiers. This act of violence so destroys Rosetta's personality that she becomesanesthetized of feeling and prostitutes herself for a pair of stockings. The novel is well written and Moravia makes the point that war is as traumatic for civilians as it is for those on the front lines.

Vapid, stupid failure of a story
This is the story of two women (Cesera the mother and Rosetta the daughter) who left Rome for the Italian countryside to flee WWII. The writer clearly has an anti-war agenda, but fails spectacularly to convince us of his point of view. His characters are arrogant and ungrateful of the hospitality of the strangers who take them in. Nothing is ever good enough for them. The food isn't what they were used to in Rome. The beds, the suroundings, and the country people are so beneath Cesera (in her haughty mine, anyway) that she refuses to relax or allow her daughter to do so. ... Read more

Product Description
Molteni, the narrator, aspires to be a man of letters, but has taken a job as a screenwriter in order to support his beautiful wife, Emilia. Frustrated by his work, he becomes convinced that Emilia no longer loves him - that in fact she despises him - and as he relentlessly interrogates her about the true nature of her feelings, he makes his deepest fear (or secret desire) come true. Contempt is a picture, frightening in its familiarity, of how, in an irremediable instant, love can turn to hate. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Ulysses Unbound
Impotence, alienation and disillusionment abound in this intense, psychological study of the dissolution of a marriage. I also suggest viewing Godard's film, Contempt - Criterion Collection, which is based on this novel, yet categorically simplifies its philosophical tenets.

Great writing, but I wish I could have liked the characters.
Written in 1954, this novel by the esteemed Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, is a small gem and a showcase of fine writing.Written in the first person, the narrator describes the slow falling apart of his marriage.Stark, with a complex mood, the reader gets to hear his inner monologue.He is definitely neurotic and I found some of the complaining annoying, but he sure does set the tone.This man is obsessed with his wife and analyzes every excruciating detail of their lives.I was often exasperated at this and would have put the book down but it was a selection of my literary reading group, so I forced myself to continue.

The narrator sees himself as an artistic writer who takes a job writing screenplays because he wants to satisfy his wife and create a home for her. This is after the first two years of their marriage when they truly loved each other.When they move into their new home, everything changes.The narrator can't understand why.

We meet his boss, a typical movie type, who winds everyone around his fingers and wants to do a screenplay of The Odyssey.And then there is the director who he must work with, a German who is into psychology and wants the story to play out in a Freudian psychological way. The theme of marital discord runs throughout the book.

The ending was surreal.I thought it was a copout.And yet, it worked.My feelings about this book are complex.I have no doubt that the author is a fine writer.But I wish I could have liked the characters.I felt like screaming "get a life" to all of them, especially the narrator.

This is a worthwhile read if you can stand it.But I'm glad it's over.

love gone oh so sour
dead-on, deadpan, unflinching, painful, and pathetic portrayal of love gone oh so sour. the genius is the narrative voice, and how moravia makes you feel both sympathy and contempt for him. kept me emotionally and intellectually engaged throughout.

Faustian Bargain and the Unreliable Narrator
After a second reading of Contempt, I feel compelled to call the short, tautly written novel a masterpiece. Told from the perspective of a neurotic egotist, the narrator accounts how he "sacrificed" his literary writing career to debase himself in the tawdry task of writing screenplays so that he can afford to lavish his wife with a bigger more opulent living quarters. The narrator convinces himself that not only does his wife not appreciate his "sacrifice," but that sheno longer loves him. It's horrifying to read this narcissist's account of his marital disintegration because you begin to realize that he is projecting his own lack of love toward his wife (a pefectly fine, loving woman) and you realize that he is so emotionally arrested that he is incapable of loving anyone. Further, a close reading reveals that the narrator never sacrificed his writing career for his wife's opulent tastes, but rather is debasng his writing talents for his own greedy materialistic acquistion.

Many see Moravia's novel as the quintessential example of "modernism," the movement that emphasizes the human limitation for self-understanding and the understanding of others. Also, the novel explores Freudian themes of projection, paranoia, and the powers of the unconscious.

The novel is fast-paced save for a few chapters where the writer and director indulge in long-winded discussions about the mythical exposition of their film but overall the novel is a real page-turner full of suspense and psychological realism.

If you enjoy this suspensful novel told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, I recommend Asylum by Patrick McGrath, Despair by Vladimir Nabokov, and The Horned Man by James Lasdun.

Moravia At His Creative Peak
Finally, someone had the common decency to reprint Moravia in translation. And they also picked the best titles. Il Disprezzo (The Contempt) is the best, most honest, unflinching look at the disintegration of a relationship that I have ever read. Last released in the States in the 1950's under the title A Ghost at Noon, this is the same excellent translation by Angus Davidson, who translated almost all of the authors works up until his death in 1990. If you've ever experienced the conclusion of a long-term relationship and for some masochistic reason want to remember what it was like, this is the book for you. I guess that's not a ringing endorsement. But trust me, Moravia's penchant for psychological details is so devastatingly on-point, you'll find yourself nodding nauseatingly at the pathetic delusions and convoluted rationalizations taking place between the couple. It should be noted that this isn't the book's only focus. Quite uncharacteristically, Moravia tackles popular culture and the highbrow-lowbrow dichotomy in a darkly humorous fashion. I haven't seen Godard's film adaptation but I understand that it is an incredible achievement in itself. ... Read more

Product Description
Based on the true story of Alix di Burgotte, who chose to live in a stone cell for 47 years, this novel brings to life the social and spiritual upheavals that followed the Hundred Years' War. The intersecting lives of Alix, a Turkish adventurer, an idealistic Lombard, and a Bohemian heretic confront the barbarity of an age very much like our own. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A haunting and dramatic novel
Expertly translated from the original Italian by Arthur K. Bierman, Sealed In Stone is the English-language rendition of Anno 1424, a haunting and dramatic novel by Toni Maraini. Set during the Hundred Years' War and based on the historical figure of Alix la Bourgotte, Sealed In Stone is the story of a young Parisian recluse who lives within a cell located in the wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents and observes a boisterous, turbulent, and dangerous world of thieves, scoundrels, rebels, intellectuals, heretics, and pilgrims. Enhanced with an introduction by Alberto Moaravia, Sealed In Stone is very strongly recommended, literate and dramatic story of love, passion, and death amidst a bygone world of violence and change. ... Read more

Product Description
A magic decade of Italian writing followed the fall of Benito Mussolini's Fascist government and the liberation of Rome in 1944. William Weaver, who drove an ambulance for the British Army during the war, also arrived in Rome in the late 1940s, fell in love with the Italian language and literature, and found a career in translating the writers he met there. Open City is an anthology of the writers Weaver admired most, described in a long introductory memoir - Silone, Moravia, Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Emilio Gadda. No other book offers such a comprehensive sampling of the political seriousness and lyrical realism which were the gift of the Italians to modern writing.Amazon.com Review
Traddutore, traditore, goes the old Italian proverb: Totranslate is to betray. But William Weaver, who has assembled a fineanthology of contemporary Italian prose in Open City: Seven Writersin Postwar Rome, is anything but treacherous toward hisfavorites. For one thing, he is our preeminent translator from thateuphonious, vowel-encrusted language, and anybody who reads hiselegant versions of Italo Calvinoor Umberto Ecowill recognize what a great service he has performed to thesehigh-wire stylists--not to mention their readers.

But as Weaver's preface-cum-memoir makes clear, he is not merely alinguistic loyalist. During the late 1940s and '50s, when the youngtranslator lived in Rome, he got to know all the contributors toOpen City: IgnazioSilone, GiorgioBassani, AlbertoMoravia, Elsa Morante, NataliaGinzburg, CarloLevi, and Carlo EmilianoGadda. This anthology, then, is a peculiarly personal one, inwhich the editor exposes us to both the art and life of eachauthor. It necessarily excludes such giants as Primo Levi, LeonardoSciascia, and Calvino, none of whom happened to cross Weaver'spath during his dolce vita phase. But the septet he hasassembled is a splendid one, which suggests that the Eternal City wassome kind of literary hot spot in the wake of the Second World War.

Gadda undoubtedly wins the crown for sheer stylistic extravagance. Theexcerpt Weaver has chosen from That Awful Mess on ViaMerulana gives a vivid sense of the challenges (and rewards!) of that macaronic masterpiece. (It also includes some of the bestportraiture of Rome itself, "lying as if on a map or scale model: itsmoked slightly, at Porta San Paolo: a clear proximity of infinitethoughts and palaces, which the north wind had cleansed.") At theopposite end of the spectrum is Natalia Ginzburg, whose antirhetoricalstyle still makes most contemporary novelists sound crude andinflationary, especially when it comes to minute discriminations offeeling. And in between, we find such marvels as Moravia's "Agostino"(a cruelly accurate account of childhood's end), Morante's "TheNameless One," and an excerpt from Carlo Levi's The Watch, whichdispenses its wisdom casually but hits the bull's-eye every time:

The world holds us with a thousand ties of habit, work,inertia, affections. It's difficult and painful to separate fromthem. But as soon as a foot rests on a train, airplane, or automobilethat will carry us away, everything disappears, the past becomesremote and is buried, a new time crowded to the brim with unknownpromises envelopes us and, entirely free and anonymous, we look aroundsearching for new companions.

Customer Reviews (4)

Extremely Frustrating
I bought this book here several years ago when I was freshly back from a wonderful trip to Italy.For whatever reason, I never felt like reading it until last week.After reading the first piece, by Morante, I am not eager to read any further.

I knew this book consisted of excerpts from other pieces, but I assumed they would be chosen and edited carefully so they could stand on there own.Sadly, this was not the case at all.After reading the 100+ page excerpt from House of Liars, the piece just stopped dead in it's tracks with no resolution for any of the characters.In fact, it stopped right in the midst of a turning point for all four of the main characters.I was shocked that it ended there.

I feel like I paid $13.00 for a "sneak preview" designed to get me to buy the books that are excerpted.Thanks, but no thanks.

Speedy
I received the book, just when I needed it.It was the first of my books to arrive.

A Lost City Revisited
In the introduction to this touching collection of several influential writers, William Weaver illustrates with photographic precision the personalities and circumstances that defined the Rome of the postwar epoch. For anyone interested in contemporary Italian writing, Mr. Weaver'sprofound insight and vast personal knowledge of both Rome and its writerswill be an enlightening experience.No other book offers the reader such afascinating invitation into the lives and stories that were the lost, opencity of postwar Rome.

A Lost City Revisited
In the introduction to this touching collection of several influential writers, William Weaver illustrates with photographic precision the personalities and circumstances that defined the Rome of the postwar epoch. For anyone interested in contemporary Italian writing, Mr. Weaver'sprofound insight and vast personal knowledge of both Rome and its writerswill be an enlightening experience.No other book offers the reader such afascinating invitation into the lives and stories that were the lost, opencity of postwar Rome. ... Read more

Product Description
The glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini provide the background of what is probably Alberto Moravia's best and best-known novel - The Woman of Rome. It's the story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and could never quite identify the moment when she traded her private dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute. One of the very few novels of the twentieth century which can be ranked with the work of Dostoevsky, The Woman of Rome also tells the stories of the tortured university student Giacomo, a failed revolutionary who refuses to admit his love for Adriana; of the sinister figure of Astarita, the Secret Police officer obsessed with Adriana; and of the coarse and brutal criminal Sonzogno, who treats Adriana as his private property. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

God Save the Woman in a Fascist Regime
A riveting portrait of a Roman prostitute during the Fascist regime. Moravia has a well developed insight into feminine psychology. What I find most compelling in this novel are the restricted choices women had during the era: wife/mother, maid, seamstress or prostitute. If in desperate need of money, prostitution is the expedient choice in a patriarchal society. Adriana navigates the seedy underworld with grace and to a wonderfully ironic conclusion.

If you like Moravia, you'll like it
Good novel. You must like Moravia, and you should not mind about happy ends. I enjoyed it, and I will remember it, so I'm doubting between 4 or 5 stars.

Unforgettable
This story of innocence and failure is told by the beautiful and flawed Adriana, whose desire for a tranquil life cannot reconcile itself with the corrupt world she lives in and cannot escape from. Set in Mussolini's Rome, the elegant and readable story is full of the kinds of complexities and frustrations real life provides.

Adriana is an unforgettable character, somehow maintaining her innocence and hope despite descending into what her society would call scandalous circumstances. Through her strength alone, it seems, the story manages to end with a touch of optimism.

The reputation of this book precedes it, and so I won't spend more time describing the plot or heaping more superlatives on what is likely the best book to come from Alberto Moravia, one of Italy's most underrated authors.

Read The Woman of Rome, and even if it touches you only a
fraction of the extent to which it touched me, that will be more than most books can aspire to.

Our fragile human nature
Moravia's elegant novel takes the familiar theme of unfulfilled dreams and invests it with quiet strength and descriptive authenticity.Months after reading "Woman in Rome," it is the voice of Adriana, the woman of the title, that lingers in my memory.By telling in the 1st person his story of a young woman whose beauty, poverty, passivity and kindness lead her to prostitution and abandonment, the author shows us how such a fall from hope and grace is a gradual, imperceptible process, one day after the next.Moravia writes in a deceptively simple style that keeps the reader close to his heroine's actions, so that her losses become our own.Near the end of the novel there is an astonishing paragraph, in which the narrator imagines herself drowning.This heartbreaking paragraph encapsulates the downward pull of the entire book, the longing for oblivion in the face of lost dreams.It is too long to quote in full, but here are some excerpts.(Note, too, the beautiful translation.)

"I obeyed and he undressed in the dark and got into bed beside me.I turned toward him to embrace him, but he pushed me away wordlessly and curled himself up on the edge of the bed with his back to me.This gesture filled me with bitterness and I, too, hunched myself up, waiting for sleep with a widowed spirit.But I began to think about the sea again and was overcome by the longing to drown myself.I imagined it would only be a moment's suffering, and then my lifeless body would float from wave to wave beneath the sky for ages. [...]At last I would sink to the bottom, would be dragged head downward toward some icy blue current that would carry me along the sea for months and years among submarine rocks, fish, and seaweed, and floods of limpid seawater would wash my forehead, my breast, my belly, my legs, slowly wearing away my flesh, smoothing and refining me continually.And at last some wave, someday, would cast me up on some beach, nothing but a handful of fragile, white bones [...] a little heap of bones, without human shape, among the clean stones of a shore."

Amor Fati in Fascist Italy
Alberto Moravia was a leading mid-Twentieth Century Italian novelist and short story writer. Although his works were quickly translated into English, they were little read in the United States.Fortunately for interested readers, many of his books are now in print again and accessible, including his 1949 novel, The Woman of Rome.

This is a story of Adriana, a beautiful, poor, and uneducated young woman who begins as an artist's model at the age of 16.Although she dreams of a quiet, modest home with a loving husband and children, she becomes both a prostitute and a thief.As a prostitute, she is involved with a number of men with competing ideologies and interests including Astarita, a Fascist chief of police, Giacomo, a student revolutionary against the Fascists and Sozmogo, a criminal and a thug.

The story is told in the first person.Adriana is always on stage and the character of highest interest.The reader gets to know her well.The book is told in a linear, easy-to-follow style which builds to a large cresendo, for me, at the end of the first part.The second part of the book loses slightly in dramatic intensity and in construction.

As with any work of depth, this book functions on a number of levels which reject easy paraphrase or simple meaning.Many readers see the book as a picture of corruption in Rome while others see it more as the story of Adriana.I am more inclined to the second view.As far as I can tell, however, there is a strong spiritual theme in the book which sometimes gets too little emphasis in the pull of conflicting readings.

There are no less than four pivotal scenes in The Woman of Rome set in a church.Although the book is replete with sex, violence and raw brutality, it is also highly internalized.Many of its most effective moments are those in which Adriana relects (in church or out) on her life and on the course it has taken.

The German philosopher Frederich Nietxche (Adriana does not mention and would not have known of him) used the phrase "amor fati" to describe the wise person's attitude towards life.The phrase means loving one's destiny or, to use another related Nietschean phrase, "becoming who one is".The specific facts of one's life may be determined by circumstance.What is not determined is one's attitude.A person can understand his or her life and accept it joyfully, regardless of its state.It is in the acceptance and understanding that choice resides and that gives life its value and dignity.

The novel shows the attempt of a poor, but intelligent woman to find "amor fati" and to become who she is.She struggles to accept her nature and her being as a prostitute.Many of Adriana's reflections in the church are quite explicit and insightful. Adriana, alas, is no more successful than are most people in staying with her insight into herself.That, in my opinion, is the tragedy of the story which leads to the downfall of the men involved with Adriana.

The spiritual tone of the book goes well beyond Nietsche.Together with the theme of amor fati, there is a religiosity that emphasises, in the context of Western theology, God as merciful and as all-forgiving rather than God as a moralizer or judge. This God -- or self-understanding is open to all regardless of creed or station.The religion that seems to be espoused in the book recognizes the sinful, fallen nature of people and their frequent inability to change.It seems to suggest the possiblity of atonement and forgiveness offered to everyone by a turning of the heart, even if, perhaps, behavior cannot be changed.It is a powerful picture of a God of mercy and forgiveness who holds the possiblity of love out to all.

This is a first-rate or nearly first-rate Twentieth Century novel. ... Read more

Product Description
Contents: CRIME AT THE TENNIS CLUB (1927), END OF A RELATIONSHIP (1933), THE WAYWARD WIFE (1937), A BAD WINTER (1940), HOME IS A SACRED PLACE (1942), CONTACT WITH THE WORKING CLASS (1944), THE WOMAN FROM MEXICO (1948), THE NEGRO AND THE OLD MAN WITH THE BILL-HOOK (1948) ... Read more