Word: moravia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...modern Italian knows this role better than Alberto Moravia, who has been Italy's leading literary celebrity for half a century. His first novel, The Time of Indifference (1929), scrutinized the bourgeoisie and the coming of Mussolini. His antiFascism and pungent tales gained audiences throughout Europe and the U.S. Films were based on his work, notably Two Women, which established Sophia Loren as a serious actress. Today his own scripts, movie reviews and articles are as much a part of Roman life as the traffic. In addition, Moravia benefits from the special relationship European authors have with their readers...
Such combat has not hindered Moravia's career. His entwined political and sexual themes were assured attention by strictures from il Duce and the Vatican. His latest novel, La Vita Interiore (The Internal Life), was banned last year under Italy's broad obscenity laws. The old national debate over censorship was rekindled; Moravia's gray head bloomed once again on magazine covers, and brawls erupted at public meetings where sections of the novel were read aloud...
...book arrives like an immigrant with a pocketful of soft currency. It is difficult to imagine how an obscenity case about a piece of Italian fiction will cause a stir in the U.S., where hard-core pornography can be bought openly in Mom-and-Pop candy stores. Furthermore, as Moravia readers might suspect, there is nothing pornographic about the novel. It is, in fact, highly moral and antierotic. The author has always treated unaffectionate sex as symptomatic of public disintegration and spiritual malaise. The more convoluted the sex, the more disturbed the character or the society...
...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...
...Moravia has always been adept at manipulating literary conceits for startling effect. He once wrote a novel about a man who talked to his penis. An Italian Joan of Arc who hears the voice of nihilism calling her to action is a promising conception, and the author has not lost his admirable appetite for extremism in the defense of humanism...