Alberto Moravia Books In Order

Novels

Time of Indifference (1929)
The Woman of Rome (1949)
Conjugal Love (1951)
The Conformist (1952)
A Ghost At Noon (1955)
Two Women (1958)
The Empty Canvas (1961)
The Lie (1966)
The Fancy Dress Party (1968)
Two of Us (1972)
Two (1972)
Bought and Sold (1973)
Mother Love (1976)
The Voice of the Sea (1978)
Time of Desecration (1980)
1934 (1983)
The Voyeur (1987)
Journey to Rome (1990)
Boredom (1999)
Contempt (1999)
Agostino (2014)

Collections

Two Adolescents (1952)
Bitter Honeymoon (1954)
Roman Tales (1954)
More Roman Tales (1959)
The Wayward Wife (1960)
The Fetish (1964)
Command and I Will Obey You (1969)
Paradise and Other Stories (1971)
Lady Godiva (1975)
Two Friends (2011)

Plays

Non fiction

Man As an End (1965)
Red Book and the Great Wall (1968)
Which Tribe Do You Belong To? (1974)
Life of Moravia (2000)

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Alberto Moravia Books Overview

Time of Indifference

With the reissue of several Alberto Moravia novels, English speakers are discovering this peerless Italian writer. In The Time of Indifference, Moravia’s stunning first novel, a bourgeois Roman family succumbs to decadence and self obsession.

The Woman of Rome

The glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini provide the background of what is probably Alberto Moravia’s best and best known novel The Woman of Rome. It’s the story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and could never quite identify the moment when she traded her private dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute. One of the very few novels of the twentieth century which can be ranked with the work of Dostoevsky, The Woman of Rome also tells the stories of the tortured university student Giacomo, a failed revolutionary who refuses to admit his love for Adriana; of the sinister figure of Astarita, the Secret Police officer obsessed with Adriana; and of the coarse and brutal criminal Sonzogno, who treats Adriana as his private property.

Conjugal Love

‘A story of love, obsession, and betrayal from ‘the most important Italian creative writer of the twentieth century.’ The Times London 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. Antonio, the local barber who comes every morning to shave Silvio, sparks off this dangerously combustible situation when Leda accuses him 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. Alberto Moravia earned his international reputation with frank, finely observed stories of love and sex at all levels of society. In this new English translation of Conjugal Love, he explores an imperiled relationship with his customary unadorned style, psychological penetration, and narrative art.

The Conformist

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

Two Women

Cesira, a widowed shopkeeper, and Rosetta, her beautiful young daughter, flee south from Rome to escape the German occupation, hoping to wait out the war in Cesira’s native province. But the Allied liberation brings tragedy that changes the women s lives forever. Out of print for 30 years, this moving portrayal of the anguish and horror of war was the inspiration for the 1960 film for which Sophia Loren won the Oscar for best actress.

Two

This volume of Fiction International features AIDS art and photomontages from Germany and England from a worldwide range of essayists, fiction writers and visual artists.

1934

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.

The Voyeur

A first person account of a rather ordinary married man trapped in a domestic triangle with his father and his wife. A powerful novel of social satire, black comedy and first rate entertainment.

Boredom

The novels that the great Italian writer Al berto Moravia produced in the years following the World War II represent an extraord inary 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 dangerou sly attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, an d imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of mode rn life is one of the masterworks of a writer who, as Anthony Burgess once rema rked, was always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio.

Contempt

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 ex acting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still striki ng openness about sex are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt wh ich was to inspire Jean Luc Godard’s no less celebrated film is an unflinching exam ination of desperation and self deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society. Molteni, the narrator, aspires to be a man of letters, but has taken a job as a screenwriter in order to support his beautiful wife, Emilia. Frustrated by his work, he becomes convinced that she no longer loves him that in fact she despises him and a’s he relentlessly interrogates her about the true nature of her feelings, he makes h is deepest fear or secret desire come true.

Life of Moravia

THE EXTRAORDINARY self posession of Alberto Moravia can be traced to the many months he endured as a child and as a young man, confined to his bed, entirely alone, with nothing but books and his imagination to carry him through a long struggle against tuberculosis of the bone. He had no friends, no social life, no years at a university to connect him to the world. The result was a kind of unblinking gaze and acceptance of life which made him first one of the great novelists of the age, and finally one of the great memoirists. The Time of Indifference, his first novel published this season by Steerforth, begun when he was only eighteen and published three years later, in 1929, changed the Italian literary landscape forever. That early fame never died and later novels The Woman of Rome, The Conformist only enhanced his reputation. Moravia put his life into his books but only now, with this unusual autobiography in the form of an interview with his friend, the writer Alain Elkann, is it possible to understand the literary use he made of the bourgeois world of his childhood in Rome, of his encounter with Fascism under Mussolini, of his months in hiding from the Germans in the mountains south of Rome, and of his marriages to two of the leading writers of his time Elsa Morante and Dacia Maraini.