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IN 1929, THE FIFTH YEAR of the Fascist era and the twenty-first year of Alberto Moravia's life, the Italian literary world was stunned by the appearance of his first novel,The Time of Indifference. It was a deceptively simple story - five characters, the events of a few days, the intrigues of families and lovers. The place is Rome. The central figure is Michele, a young man in confused but furious rebellion against the emptiness of bourgeois life. His father is dead; his mother, Mariagrazia, desperately clings to her bored lover, Leo; his sister has no hope of marriage or career and bleakly prepares to give herself to Leo as well. A frequent visitor is Leo's former lover, Lisa, ostensibly Mariagrazia's friend, a woman who feels she is in the final late bloom before age destroys beauty. She longs to make Michele her lover, but he is bored and disgusted by her pretenses, her vanity, her desperation. All five are cast loose on the sea of modern life - obsessed with what they want, what they feel they are owed, the wrongs that have been done them, their loneliness. What Moravia destroys forever in this pitiless novel is the illusion that a world of ever-growing material comfort can ever feed the human soul.… (more)
Carla observed her with something like compassion; the laborious and painful way in which her mother dug these constructions up out of the pit of her incomprehension always inspired a disgusted pity in her.
She wasn't hungry, sitting there in the midst of all the famished things in her life: in truth, this room in which she shoudl have been nourished had nourished itself on her; and day by day all those inanimate objects had sucked her vitality dry, with a tenacity stronger than her vain attempts to free herself from them.
But once he was back out on the street he had felt no jealousy, no pain, only an intolerable disgust at his own versatile indifference, which permitted him to change his ideas and attitudes every day the way other people change their clothes.
IN 1929, THE FIFTH YEAR of the Fascist era and the twenty-first year of Alberto Moravia's life, the Italian literary world was stunned by the appearance of his first novel,The Time of Indifference. It was a deceptively simple story - five characters, the events of a few days, the intrigues of families and lovers. The place is Rome. The central figure is Michele, a young man in confused but furious rebellion against the emptiness of bourgeois life. His father is dead; his mother, Mariagrazia, desperately clings to her bored lover, Leo; his sister has no hope of marriage or career and bleakly prepares to give herself to Leo as well. A frequent visitor is Leo's former lover, Lisa, ostensibly Mariagrazia's friend, a woman who feels she is in the final late bloom before age destroys beauty. She longs to make Michele her lover, but he is bored and disgusted by her pretenses, her vanity, her desperation. All five are cast loose on the sea of modern life - obsessed with what they want, what they feel they are owed, the wrongs that have been done them, their loneliness. What Moravia destroys forever in this pitiless novel is the illusion that a world of ever-growing material comfort can ever feed the human soul.
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