Contempt

Ayn Rand's writing is probably the only thing that I have read and found more annoying than Contempt. Moravia's idea had such great potential. An existential, psychological drama, doesn't it sound promising? In fact, Moravia did succeed in portraying the obsessive, supremely self-centered and over-analytic narrator, Riccardo Molteni, pretty well. He lets the reader discover the unreliability of the narrator and see through his wrong judgements slowly during the course of the novel. But being inside the head of this obsessive narrator gets irritating very soon...like fingernails scraping a chalkboard. He is so full of negativity. I have nothing against a negative character being the lead, but he/she should be somewhat interesting. On the show more contrary, Molteni's narration is excruciatingly painful to read and insufferably repetitive.

"Emilia doesn't love me."
"I am too good to be writing film-scripts."
"Emilia, why do you despise me?"
"Emilia, do you love me?"

Keep repeating these thoughts in a mixed fashion, throw in the words repugnance, despise, have an explanation with as often as possible and you have the first 150 pages written.
Now bring in a director who incessantly analyzes Ulysses from Odyssey, repeat the phrases from the previous part whenever the director shuts up and that's another 70-80 pages.

The narrator sometimes gets stuck at one thought and writes an entire page saying the same thing several times. At times he thinks way too slowly. He devotes one full page to Emilia discussing the dinner menu with the maid, and another page analyzing that scene. Not just that the thoughts are repeated, they are expressed in the same manner, using the same words over and over again. May be it is the translator's fault, but I do not want to read the same phrase four times in a single paragraph.

This still could have been tolerable if the prose weren't so lifeless and dry. All I felt while reading Contempt was FRUSTRATION! It is not touching, it is no fun to read, it is not informative or thought-provoking, why read it?

Riccardo Molteni, STOP THINKING or JUST DIE! show less

It was reading this unending tirade that made me realize there was a style to 20th century existentialist literature that I assume stemmed from Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”: first-person rants from unlikeable characters. As much as I like Dostoevsky’s story, many of the novels it inspired make the reader feel like they’re cornered at a party by an obnoxious bore. I could almost feel the spit flying from the mouth of Alberto Moravia’s protagonist as he droned on about his irrational jealousy and the demise of his marriage. I somehow made it halfway through the book based on memories of Moravia’s infinitely superior The Conformist, though I really should have known better after having read his aptly titled Boredom show more last year. show less

Some novelists are better off writing novellas.

It is rare, anymore, to encounter, in the context of the 'psychological novel,' an uninsightful character who is not, at least implicitly, presented as such. If we can find this anywhere, it is perhaps in the product of the older, typically male, author who cannot sustain an --- idea.

Moravia is capable of writing. The characters and situation are adequately sketched, often humorously, and with an emotional clarity which is the mark of mastery; and perhaps the early expository section remains worthwhile for these reasons. However, the narrator's fixation on the single explanation, incapable of considering the additional possibility or playing one off of the other, never considering a show more subsequent movement, occasionally acting with cleverness but only by instinct, and the unshakable - to the last pages - belief/conceit that he could "prove [his] case" against the charge of contempt if given the opportunity, is bizarre. Not to mention the high-school-level Freudian interpretation of Ulysses presented as fracturing deep-brain-insight by one of Wager's operatic eponyms. show less

Moravia masterfully writes a novel about the contempt, real or imagined, between Molteni (the narrator) and his wife. Molteni's obsession reminded me of an insecure teenage girl. He was constantly second guessing himself, wondering if his wife still loved him or not. Every chapter he had a new revelation in which he figured out the source of his wife's contempt and every chapter he would be left guessing again whether she loved him or not and trying all manner of moves to win her love again. It's a short and very intense study into the one word, contempt.

"I was not so much meditating as stirring together in my mind the cold, acid flavors of the various feelings, all of them disagreeable, that agitated me." "I was all nerves and imagination, morbidly sensitive and complex."

Molteni, your narrator, never more accurately describes both his personal weaknesses and his narrative style. There are no rays of light in "Contempt." This novel incarcerates a reader within the arrogant and insecure psyche of an unsatisfied man. Molteni is incredibly self-conscious without being self-aware and certainly without being aware of his wife. "Contempt" centers around the total breakdown of his relationship with Emilia, who he introduces as follows: "I had not married a woman who could understand and share show more my ideas, tastes and ambitions; instead I had married, for her beauty, an uncultivated, simple typist, full, it seemed to me, of all the prejudices and ambitions of the class from which she came."

That "seemed to me" clause is rather important. It should not be surprising that Molteni's classist portrait of his love-object should fall short as a true characterization. While Moravia succeeds in making Molteni's obsessions and anxieties seem plausible and addictive, he doesn't convince me, entirely, that someone could have his head buried so far up his ass as Molteni. A jealous and insecure man would be more aware of the implications of subjecting his wife to the courtship of another man and he would certainly be more reluctant to let her alone with any of her dashing suitors.

However, the relentlessness of Molteni's self-sabotage makes for a riveting account and his wife, when she chooses to defend herself, is a more engaging character than I expected. "Contempt" could probably have done without the rather tedious parallel interpretations of "The Odyssey" with all of the psychoanalysis of Ulysses and the doubting of Penelope. The themes were relevant; but a bit heavy-handed and far too prevalent. Additionally, the dream/hallucination/ghost nonsense towards the book's conclusion clashed in real pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey sort of fashion with the rest of Moravia's work.

If someone gave me specific reasons for reading another of Moravia's novels, I wouldn't object; but I'd make sure I knew what I was in for. show less

An overbearing psychological first-person narrative where the protagonist's situation is compared obscurely to the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope. Have I read this before? Yes, I have: Bernhard Schlink uses a similar device in Homecoming. The finale is simultaneously dark and reassuring.

Thinly plotted as it is, I can't say I enjoyed Contempt. There is thinking, then some more thinking, then some thinking about thinking. The "feature" of this novel is the super-analytical mind of a writer whose relationships with his wife and work overlap and disintegrate. But it felt more a study of neurosis and depression; which, from a first-hand perspective, isn't comfortable reading.

Alberto Moravia effortlessly makes the reader feel for characters that have a certain dislikeable streak to them...