Agostino by Alberto Moravia

Abstract

reviews and the much more pampered life of Jane, despite her difficulties. In traveling to find the girls, she sets off on a road trip with a group of white Africans who are self-indulgent and romantic, and she begins an affair with one of them, Harry, a man seventeen years her junior. At times she is like a dazed schoolgirl in love; at others she shows enormous sensitivity to her surroundings. But Esther is the character with whom the reader falls in love. She can be terse but is often poetic as she provides a clear-eyed description of the rebels and their abuse of the girls. Her voice is pure and devastating: “A rebel ran and caught up to the shadow. He picked it up. It was a smaller girl, I think Penelope. He didn’t bring Penelope back but pulled her over to the trees where it was dark, and I did not want to think what he was doing to her over there. She was only ten.” The two narratives do not merge until near the end of the novel, when Jane finally interviews Esther, but throughout the work we are attuned to the nuances of each voice and await the possible harmony. Wearedefinitely rewarded for our attention. This is a heartbreaking novel about Africa and about the human condition. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University Alberto Moravia. Agostino. Michael F. Moore, tr. New York. New York Review Books. 2014. isbn 9781590177235 Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) is a writer who deserves to be more widely read than he is these days. The author of countless books depicting the Italian experience during and after World War II, Moravia was a giant of modern Italian literature. The latest of his neglected classics to be retranslated into English is Agostino. It is the third novel of his to be retranslated and published by New York Review Books following Boredom and Contempt. First published in 1944 but written in 1942, Agostino failed to pass muster with the Fascist censors. The plot of Agostino is straightforward : a thirteen-year-old boy is on summer holiday with his widowed mother. Each day the boy takes his mother out in a rowboat. When the boy’s mother begins to engage in a relationship with a young man she meets on the beach, Agostino feels neglected and abandoned. In order to fill the void left by his mother, and perhaps to get back at her in some way, he takes up with a ragged group of boys and their suspect elder companion, Saro, a lifeguard at the beach. The reader should not mistake the simplicity of the plot for an underdeveloped or pedestrian narrative . Agostino is replete with all the themes so central to Moravia’s work: conjugal love, possible incest, transgression, and lost innocence, to name a few. In just over one hundred pages, Moravia is able to explore the painful coming-of-age of a boy who discovers that his mother is a woman first and a parent second. As his illusions of her begin to shatter, he finds himself adrift in a sea of conflicting emotions, so much so that he can barely stand to be in the same room with her. “As can happen, the place of these discoveries and conflicts—his home—soon became unbearable.” In a truly Freudian vein, Agostino’s first sexual awakening may be triggered by his mother. Perhaps the biggest hurdle contemporary readers will have with Agostino is the behavior of the protagonist himself. Agostino acts and speaks in such a way that it is easy to think of him as a much younger character. In fact, I had to remind myself several times that he was thirteen and on the verge of manhood, at least biologically. However, we would do well to keep in mind that Moravia wrote this in the early 1940s, when the world was a much different place. Childhood is no longer as drawn out as it used to be. Despite these differences , the universal themes of 60 worldliteraturetoday.org Danilo Kiš Night and Fog John K. Cox, tr. Helena History Press Night and Fog, a collection of dramas and screenplays...