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The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in
the years following the World War II 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."
"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.
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1934 (Paperback)
Alberto Moravia; Translated by William Weaver
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R645
R541
Discovery Miles 5 410
Save R104 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Moravia is not simply painting the portrait of an age but also
coming to grips through his art with the great questions of all
ages - the erotic, love, death, and the purposes of life. 1934
recapitulates the major themes of his art and at the same time
takes us beyond them.
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 in exile, 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.
"Moravia brings to light the devil in the flesh and in the psyche."
-"- The Atlantic Monthly
Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan
seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up
with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and
unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs.
Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly
humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women
and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang
and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his
troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead
beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any
cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his
mother.
Alberto Moravia's classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was
written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published
until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the
first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new
translation by Michael F. Moore, "Agostino "is poised to captivate
a twenty-first-century audience.
"To begin with I'd like to talk about my wife. To love means, in
addition to many other things, to delight in gazing upon and
observing the beloved."
--From Conjugal Love
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. This dangerously
combustible situation is set off when Leda accuses Antonio, the
local barber who comes every morning to shave Silvio, 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.
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Shunya Chitrapata (Oriya, Paperback)
Alberto Moravia; Translated by Jayakrushna Choudhury; Contributions by Manorama Choudhury
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R637
Discovery Miles 6 370
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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