Alberto Moravia
Personal Information
Description
Alberto Moravia is an Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist known for his fictional portrayals of social alienation and loveless sexuality. He was a major figure in 20th-century Italian literature. Moravia contracted tuberculosis of the bone (a form of osteomyelitis usually caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis) at the age of 8, but, during several years in which he was confined to bed and two years in sanatoriums, he studied French, German, and English; read Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Ariosto, William Shakespeare, and Molire; and began to write. Moravia was a journalist for a time in Turin and a foreign correspondent in London. His first novel, Gli indifferenti (1929; Time of Indifference), is a scathingly realistic study of the moral corruption of a middle-class mother and two of her children. It became a sensation. Some of his more important novels are Agostino (1944; Two Adolescents); La Romana (1947; The Woman of Rome); La disubbidienza (1948; Disobedience); and Il conformista (1951; The Conformist), all on themes of isolation and alienation. La ciociara (1957; Two Women) tells of an adaptation to post-World War II Italian life. La noia (1960; The Empty Canvas) is the story of a painter unable to find meaning either in love or work. Many of Moravia's books were made into motion pictures. His books of short stories include Racconti romani (1954; Roman Tales) and Nuovi racconti romani (1959; More Roman Tales). Racconti di Alberto Moravia (1968) is a collection of earlier stories. Later short-story collections include Il paradiso (1970; “Paradise”) and Boh (1976; The Voice of the Sea and Other Stories). Most of Moravia's works deal with emotional aridity, isolation, and existential frustration and express the futility of either sexual promiscuity or conjugal love as an escape. Critics have praised the author's stark, unadorned style, his psychological penetration, his narrative skill, and his ability to create authentic characters and realistic dialogue. Moravia's views on literature and realism are expressed in a stimulating book of essays, L'uomo come fine (1963; Man as an End), and his autobiography, Alberto Moravia's Life, was published in 1990. He was married for a time to the novelist Elsa Morante. Copyright © 1994-2011 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com - [Source]
Books
Life of Moravia
"Alberto Moravia was Italy's preeminent man of letters for much of the twentieth century. The author of numerous novels, stories, plays, and works of journalism and travel writing, he spent the early years of his life confined to a bed, entirely alone, with nothing but books and his imagination to carry him through a long struggle against tuberculosis of the bone. He had no friends, no social life, no years at a university to connect him to the world. And yet he would mature into not only a great writer, but also a renowned conversationalist whose self-possession and presence were said to be extraordinary. William Weaver, the translator of Life of Moravia, who knew the writer well, points out in his introductory note that from an early age Moravia would dramatize the life around him or the life he imagined beyond the walls of his sanatorium through stories and plays. And so it is fitting that this unusual memoir, the only autobiographical work Moravia left behind, be in the arm of an interview, a conversation with his friend the writer Alain Elkann."--BOOK JACKET.
Erotic tales
Throughout these twenty erotic stories, peopled with a gallery of eccentric individuals, run the recurring themes of violence, sexual yearnings, frustration, boredom, and the bourgeoisie.
Time of Desecration
Traces the life of a young Roman woman from her girlhood through her shooting, in her 20s, of a young Milanese Marxist and her mother's financial adviser, both of whom have made sexual attacks on her. The young woman, appropriately named Desideria, passes as the daughter of the wealthy Viola (the name means violet but here implies violated), who is "of Italian parentage but American by birth and upbringing." Moravia emphasizes this "two-sided" quality, as the translator unluckily renders it, telling us in Davidson's English that Viola "was different when seen from the front or the back" -- old and wasted in front, young, "graceful, sensual, provoking" from the rear. She is also placed between the past, as the widow of a Greek husband, and the present, as the holder of an American passport. And she acts two roles, as Desideria's apparent mother and her incestuous lover.