Showing posts with label Alberto Moravia. Show all posts

Monday, December 29, 2025

Brigitte Bardot / Le Mépris

Brigitte Bardot
LE MÉPRIS

Conjugal Love / A Novel by Alberto Moravia

Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia

A Novel

Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

Other. 142 pp. Paperback, $14

By Michael Dirda

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Reading Alberto Moravia's Conjugal Love will take only a couple of hours -- fortunately. For once you start this intense short novel, you won't be able to turn your eyes away. At times, you'll even want to shout at the narrator, "You fool! You idiot! Don't you see what's going to happen?"

Briefly Noted

Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia

Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

January 21, 2007

Conjugal Love, by Alberto Moravia, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss (Other; $14). A wealthy, idle man with literary aspirations retreats to an isolated villa in Tuscany with his new wife, where they make a pact: to abstain from sex until he finishes writing a story. The only intrusion is a local barber, who arrives daily to give the husband a shave—and possibly put the moves on the wife. In other hands, these would be the ingredients of farce, but Moravia, who died in 1990 and is considered one of the preëminent Italian writers of the twentieth century, delivers something at once more bitter and more tender: a parable of marriage—“that odd mixture of violent devotion and legitimate lust,” in which desire eventually gives way to “a forced and decorous composure”—that captures the essential opacity of even one’s most intimate partner.

THE NEW YORKER

Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia

Reviewed by James Marcus

Throughout his long and astonishingly productive career, Alberto Moravia never stopped exploring the erotic highways and byways. Of course, he tended to look on the dark side. Readers of his many fictions will search in vain for a life-affirming roll in the hay. Instead Moravia zoomed in on the pitfalls, power struggles, and multiple deceptions of eros. Think of him as the Beethoven of bad sex, blessed with a glittering style and the emotional temperature of an icebox.

The complete review's Review

CONJUGAL LOVE

by Alberto Moravia

Conjugal Love is narrated by Silvio Baldeschi, a dilettante ("sufficiently well off to lead a life of leisure") with some literary aspirations. A "proneness to enthusiasm" leads him to get carried away frequently, but he doesn't have much staying power -- never able to write more than a few pages, despite much grander ambitions, for example. Until Leda he also never found just the right woman, but he (impulsively, of course) decided she was the one -- and they got married.

The complete review's Review / Time of Desecration by Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia by David Levine

The complete review's Review

Time of Desecration by Alberto Moravia

M.A.Orthofer

25 December 2017

Time of Desecration is, as a prefatory note explains, a novel presented entirely in dialogue:

This novel consists of an interview given by the character indicated by the name Desideria to the author, indicated by the pronoun "I", during the seven years of the drafting of the book.

It is Desideria who initiates the dialogue -- "My name is Desideria. And I have experienced a Voice", she begins -- yet the 'I' is not so much conversation-partner -- Desideria has little interest in anything about him -- but rather functions as probing (or nudging) interlocutor, and little more; occasionally he will comment on her observations, but almost all his (brief) contributions to the exchange consist of questions meant to clarify and continue her story. His part in the exchanges might suggest the role of psychiatrist, confessor, or investigating prosecutor, but the 'I' is rarely challenging; it goes along with Desideria's story, wherever that leads, and indeed Moravia's insistence from the outset that the 'I'-role is that of the author underscores the idea that this is, in fact, not an actual exchange between two individuals, but rather a (singular) authorial thought-experiment, the mind-invention Desideria something he can shape to his specific purposes.

Alberto Moravia's Vision of Decadence

By J. D. O'Hara

June 29, 1980

BORN IN 1907, ALBERTO MORAVIA may be the dean of Italian novelists. He established himself as an important writer with his first novel, The Time of Indifference (1929), in which he attacked the corrupt and fascistic Roman bourgeoisie. The attack continued in his later works, which included a satire on Mussolini (The Fancy Dress Party, 1941) and several postwar continuations of the theme in novels like The Empty Canvas and The Conformist. His other major theme is sex, by which his characters are often obsessed and which suffers from the same indifference, corruption and self-seeking that infect the fascistic public world.

TIME OF DESECRATION

BY ALBERTO MORAVIA ‧

Ambitiously, Moravia seems to have decided to counterpoint his fiction about the moody Italian adolescents of the Fifties...

JUNE 2, 1980

Ambitiously, Moravia seems to have decided to counterpoint his fiction about the moody Italian adolescents of the Fifties with a portrait of a very Seventies young girl; the ""time of desecration"" (in Angus Davidson's titling) is much stranger than ""the time of indifference"" two decades previous. Desideria is the formerly fat (she sees herself as a ""holothurian"" or sea-cucumber) stepdaughter of a rich, widowed, polymorphously perverse American woman living in Rome named Viola (a sexual monster, alternately mother to Desideria and, after the girl slims, a lesbian seducer). And one day Desideria hears ""The Voice""--an inner but morally alien director leading her through a ""plan for transgression and desecration."" The plan includes: the acceptance of Viola's intimate caresses, then the humiliation of her for them; using foul language and defecating on I Promessi Sposi; being almost sodomized by Viola's conservative ex-lover; meeting a gigolo-cum-revolutionary named Erostrato and installing him as Viola's lover; sexual submission to a real revolutionary from Milan; and, finally, a double murder. Desideria understands that ""the Voice"" urges only acts of symbolic value: sodomy (conservative Italian politics), lesbianism (rich decadence of the bourgeoisie), and loveless intercourse (proletarian vulgarity) are all political ciphers. Her choice, as she sees it, boils down either to the orgy (escape from the world) or the group (futile attempts to change it). All this political cross-referencing distances and symbolizes the novel, of course. And so does its interlocutory format: the ""I"" of the novelist questions, and Desideria provides long answers. Hardly a book to be comfortable with, then, especially since the self-admitted grotesqueness of the socio-sexual set-pieces often veer far from plausibility. Yet for all the overstatement and the occasional plain smuttiness (as always, Moravia's eroticism fills, then overflows), there is a genuinely investigatory spirit here, Sadean in its purity. The spirit of the age, to Moravia, is apparently one of psychopathology--and he seeks its outer limits in a chilling, grating, nightmarish book.

KIRKUS

Sunday, March 14, 2021

A Ghost at Noon by Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia

A Ghost at Noon

by Alberto Moravia

A Ghost at Noon, by Alberto Moravia
Translated by Angus Davidson
Farrar Straus & Young, 1955

During the first two years of our married life my relations with my wife were, I can now assert, perfect. By which I mean to say that, in those two years, a complete, profound harmony of the senses was accompanied by a kind of numbness—or should I say, silence?—of the mind which, in such circumstances, causes an entire suspension of judgment and looks only to love for any estimate of the beloved person. Emilia, in fact, seemed to me wholly without defects, and so, also, I believe, I appeared to her. Or perhaps I saw her defects and she saw mine, but through some mysterious transformation produced by the feeling of love, such defects appeared to us both not merely forgivable but even lovable, as though instead of defects they had been positive qualities, if of a rather special kind. Anyhow, we did not judge: we loved each other. This story sets out to relate how, while I continued to love her and not to judge her, Emilia on the other hand, discovered, or thought she discovered, certain defects in me, and judged me and in consequence ceased to love me.

Il disprezzo

by Alberto Moravia

Il disprezzo, known in English as Contempt or A Ghost At Noon, is an Italian existential novel by Alberto Moravia that came out in 1954. It was the basis for the 1963 film Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard.

Saint Laurent at Casa Malaparte

Casa Malaparte
Capri, Italy

ARCHITECTURE

SAINT LAURENT AT CASA MALAPARTE

Posted on by Annalisa Guerisoli

The Casa Malaparte in Capri has been chosen as the location for the new 2018 Spring/Summer Saint Laurent campaign starring the beautiful Kate Moss. The video was directed by Nathalie Canguilhem who places the top model on the villa’s iconic staircase, an architectural walkway that seems to lead directly to the sky.

Casa Malaparte and its particular thirty-three step staircase are an icon of rationalist Italian architecture. Created between 1938 and 1943 by Adalberto Libera, but showing signs of the influential relationship between the writer Curzio Malaparte and the builder Adolfo Amitrano, it stands on the almost inaccessible promontory of Punta Masullo, one of the most fascinating and mysterious places in Capri.

Le Mépris review / Jean-Luc Godard versus marriage and the film industry

Le Mépris review – Jean-Luc Godard versus marriage and the film industry

Brigitte Bardot reminds us what all the fuss was about, alongside Jack Palance and Michel Piccoli, in this restored version of Godard’s 1963 classic

Jonathan Romney
Sunday 3 January 2016 08.00 GMT

Ifirst saw Le Mépris many years ago in a print so faded that everything was pale pink; it felt like gazing at an artefact from an immeasurably distant past. Watching the film now, with its reds and Mediterranean blues restored to their full intensity, the film is still redolent of a lost antiquity, not least because Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 feature is so steeped in melancholy and a sense of mourning.

Ostensibly adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, the film stars Michel Piccoli as writer Paul, selling his soul to work for US producer Prokosch, played by a magnificently overbearing Jack Palance. This tycoon is a philistine so monstrous that he dares rage at no less a deity than the great Fritz Lang (playing himself), whom he’s hired to direct a movie of The Odyssey.

Brigitte Bardot, meanwhile, is Paul’s wife Camille, the Penelope to Paul’s modern-day Ulysses – but she’s also Bardot. The star’s explosive physical appeal is analysed in an opening nude scene that was at once Godard’s sop to his producers, and a self-reflexively overt exercise in sex-symbol objectification. It’s a Godard film, after all: BB, the film reminds us, stands for both Brigitte Bardot and Bertolt Brecht.

Le Mépris features some of the most imposing exteriors in 60s cinema, shot by Raoul Coutard around the extraordinary Villa Malaparte on Capri – not so much a house, more a landscape installation. The centrepiece of the BFI Southbank’s new Godard season, Le Mépris is arguably the director’s only film that could bring tears to your eyes – not least because of Georges Delerue’s sublime score. It’s also a peerless source of style tips – watch Piccoli and learn how to wear your trilby “comme Dean Martin”.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Alberto Moravia / The Art of Fiction

Alberto Moravia

BIOGRAPHY

The Art of Fiction

No. 6

Interviewed by Anna Maria de Dominicis & Ben Johnson

The Paris Review
Summer No. 6
1954

Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante in Capri, ca. 1940s

Via dell’Oca lies just off the Piazza del Popolo. A curiously shaped street, it opens out midway to form a largo, tapering at either end, in its brief, cobbled passage from the Lungotevere to a side of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Its name, Street of the Goose, derives, like those of many streets in Rome, from the signboard of an eating house long forgotten.

On one side, extending unbroken from the Tiberside to Via Ripetta, sprawl the houses of working-class people: a line of narrow doorways with dark, dank little stairs, cramped windows, a string of tiny shops; the smells of candied fruit, repair shops, wines of the Castelli, engine exhaust; the cry of street urchins, the test-roar of a Guzzi, a caterwaul from a court.

On the opposite side the buildings are taller, vaguely out of place, informed with the serene imperiousness of unchipped cornices and balconies overspilling with potted vines, tended creepers: homes of the well-to-do. It is here, on this side, that Alberto Moravia lives, in the only modern structure in the neighborhood, the building jutting like a jade and ivory dike into the surrounding red-gold.

The door is opened by the maid, a dark girl wearing the conventional black dress and white apron. Moravia is behind her in the entry, checking the arrival of a case of wine. He turns. The interviewer may go into the parlor. He’ll be in directly.

My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside

My hero: Alberto Moravia

BIOGRAPHY OF ALBERTO MORAVIA

'Writers must assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social and philosophical attitude'

John Burnside
Friday 8 July 2011 22.55 BST

he first book I read by Alberto Moravia, a Panther edition of The Lie, translated by Angus Davidson, had obviously been packaged to appeal to readers interested in sex. The cover showed a naked woman, with a book nestled discreetly in her lap and her arms strategically placed to conceal her breasts, but to a Catholic boy in his late teens, it was still embarrassing enough to be tucked away where my mother wouldn't find it, along with a dog-eared copy ofThe Communist Manifesto and the occasional foil-wrapped lump of Lebanese red.

As it happened, I hadn't bought the book because I thought it was smutty, and I couldn't imagine the dirty-raincoat type finding much titillation in any of Moravia's works. It's hard to think of a writer who has been more perceptive about the disappointments of conventional sex and married life. What we find in Moravia, in fact, are unsettling accounts of what happens when our most vital and tender impulses are locked into a social institution, alongside a plangent critique of the ways in which those impulses – romantic love, tenderness, sexual desire, the need for connection – are perverted by social convention and shame.

"Critique" is a word Moravia would have treated with suspicion. "Writers," he said, "are concerned with representing . . . a more absolute and complete reality than reality itself. They must, if they are to accomplish this, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude; in consequence, their beliefs are, of course, going to find their way into their work. What artists believe, however, is of secondary importance, ancillary to the work itself. A writer survives in spite of his beliefs."

Moravia is neglected nowadays, which is a great pity, for this rare combination of moral purpose and artistic integrity once placed him among Europe's finest writers. I would argue that it is high time for a reappraisal, as well as a new edition of his work – preferably without naked ladies on the covers.

THE GUARDIAN