1934

by Alberto Moravia ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1983

If Moravia's impressive, most recent novel, Time of Desecration, exhibited a reach exceeding its grasp (exploring terrorism's amorality), this new one reverses that: the slender subject here is Moravia's longtime specialty--the personal/historical nexus of corruption--and he keeps knotting it into ever smaller (and less justifiable) knots in order to create an impression of complexity. It's 1934, in Capri, and 27-year-old Lucio, a would-be novelist and Kleist scholar, is happily desperate, wishing only that he knew a way to ""stabilize despair"" so that it wouldn't necessarily lead: to premature death. He finds himself thrown in with fellow vacationers, a German couple: Alois MÜller, a Nazi, with his red-haired, openly flirtatious wife Beate--who virtually flings herself on Lucio. But, though Lucio wants Beate in the worst way, he finds himself confused by Alois' attitude--a submissiveness which is alternately brutal and limp. Worse yet, what Beate really wants from Lucio, it turns out, isn't so much sex as a joint-suicide pact, à la Kleist/Henriette Vogel. Then, suddenly, Beate disappears, leaving for Germany; her twin-sister Trude arrives in her stead, offering herself up to Lucio as a frank surrogate. And at this point the novel becomes a slaughterhouse of Lucio's agonized question marks: Is Trude really Beate in disguise? Who is being corrupted here? Who is doing the corrupting? Is it all a masquerade? A joke? But, unfortunately, though Moravia tries to spin out this thin material as one long unbroken spool, a Mbius strip of reality and unreality, the effect is merely tedious. Nor are matters much helped by the duplications, the literary/historical references (Kleist, Nietzsche, Hitler), the crude erotics (Trude lasciviously eating a banana, etc.), or the midnight-bedchamber suspense. And there's more narrative power in one of the wayward digressions here (a Russian woman tells Lucio a story of sexual/political traduction in early Bolshevik days) than there is in Moravia's central peekaboo construct. Convoluted doodlings on themes treated far more powerfully in other Moravia novels: a boring--and seemingly bored--fiasco.

Pub Date: April 1, 1983

ISBN: 0374526524

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION