Monday, June 16, 2008

Alberto Moravia in TLS

TLS reviews a posthumously published novel by Alberto Moravia. This is a pretty good summary:

Moravia specialized in composing requiems for the death of traditional humanism, his central themes being the reduction of man to the status of a commodity, one “thing” among many, and the psychological suffering that occurs as a result. In a word, alienation: external and internal, all-pervading and inescapable, conveyed in the stark titles of his novels: Gli indifferenti, La disubbidienza, Il conformista, Il disprezzo, La noia. His work consists of a series of variations on the myriad ways in which modern men dehumanize themselves and others, as articulated in different, but essentially analogous emotional registers: indifference, refusal, conformity, contempt, boredom.

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