Word: desideria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...name suggests, Desideria has obsessions and longings of her own. She is an arresting character whose heartless voice dominates the narrative, cleverly cast as an interview: Moravia asks the questions and then ventriloquizes Desideria's bizarre tale...
...Desideria's natural mother was a prostitute who sold her to Viola, who fluctuates between being an overattentive parent and an insatiable bisexual. Left alone, Desideria fills her loneliness with autoeroticism and calories. Viola puts the girl on a diet and discovers a voluptuous beauty beneath the flab. Reborn, Desideria hears a voice that commands her to attack her mother's values and property and save her virginity for a militant radical. At first the rebellion is symbolic, a form of childish Dada ("Practically the whole of our life is a tissue of unreasoned respects, of unfounded taboos...
...Time of Desecration is not extreme enough. Its materials call out for the purging effects of outrageous comedy. There is some bitter wit in Desideria's cold-eyed observations, but her force as a character is throttled by garrulous abstractions. She is convincing only when she is a sounding board for Moravia's feelings, most tellingly: "I had been bourgeois, I was bourgeois, I would remain bourgeois, forever...
...Desideria: She was... two-sided...
...Desideria: Yes, she was different when seen from the front or the back. If you looked at her from in front, you saw a mature woman with a wasted, deteriorated, worn-out body. Her neck looked decrepit, with two or three circles of wrinkles all round it; on her chest, her breasts hung down like two brown bags, deflated and flabby; her belly, possibly because of an interrupted pregnancy, was a regular network of thin folds. But if you told her to turn round, you then saw the back of a young woman, a woman of less than thirty...