Alberto Moravia

L’Agostino deixa de ser un nen l’estiu en què la seva mare s’enamora d’un home. Aquella deessa que ell sempre havia imaginat dedicada i intocable és també una dona. Decebut i ressentit per aquesta descoberta, el protagonista malda per alliberar-se de la figura materna i comença a freqüentar amistats dubtoses que el portaran a deixar enrere la innocència. La brutalitat d’aquests nous amics l’espanta però també hi ha alguna cosa d’ells que el fascina, una atracció deliciosa i cruel que l’atrapa i el repulsa alhora. Moravia explora amb precisió la dolorosa i incerta aventura de l’adolescent que es veu atrapat entre dues edats. Més enllà de la descripció d’una etapa difícil i plena de turments, en aquesta història hi podem llegir els símptomes d’una altra crisi que se situa en el centre de tota l’obra de l’autor: el desajustament entre la consciència i la realitat. Nascut a Roma el 1907, Alberto Moravia va escriure la seva primera novel·la, Els indiferents, quan tenia poc menys de vint anys en un sanatori del nord d’Itàlia on es refeia d’una tuberculosi que no li va deixar acabar els estudis. Durant la Segona Guerra Mundial, va ser perseguit pels feixistes per haver escrit una sàtira política. Després del final de la guerra, torna a Roma i gaudeix d’una gran popularitat. La seva obra està conformada per una trentena de títols entre els quals destaquen El conformista, El menyspreu i La camperola. Algunes de les seves novel·les han estat adaptades al cinema per directors com ara Vittorio De Sica o Jean-Luc Godard. Agostino també va ser duta al cinema el 1962. Va morir a Roma el setembre del 1990.

The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following the Second World War represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a writer whom as Anthony Burgess once remarked, was "always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio."

Edito nel 1948, questo breve romanzo riprende, ampliandola e approfondendola, l’avventura già narrata in Agostino, la guarigione, cioè, attraverso l’iniziazione sessuale, di un adolescente incapace di trovare un vitale equilibrio tra sé e l’ambiente, tra le sue aspirazioni e la realtà. Per risolvere il conflitto causato dalla sua incapacità di adattamento, Luca, il protagonista, ricorre a una continua e sistematica disubbidienza ai doveri, agli affetti, ai piaceri, fino al rifiuto della vita stessa. Sarà l’esperienza suprema dell’adolescenza, l’incontro con l’altro sesso, a sottrarlo a questo incantesimo negativo indicandogli una alternativa più gioiosa e vitale.

Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous ~~ his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society.

Secrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now exiled in France, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open - and with it the corrupt heart of Fascism. Moravia equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychological needs of his protagonist for whom conformity becomes an obsession in a life that has included parental neglect, an oddly self-conscious desire to engage in cruel acts, and a type of male beauty which, to Clerici's great distress, other men find attractive.