Word: romes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...When in Rome...
...admission, Adriana was "a real beauty" with "firm straight legs, curving hips, a long back, narrow waist and broad shoulders. Mother said . . . there was not a figure like mine in all Rome." Adriana liked men, all kinds and any age, with an earthy nymphomania that inevitably took her into prostitution...
Adriana is the ripe, first-person singular heroine of The Woman of Rome, a long, languorous novel by Italy's most trumpeted living writer, Alberto Moravia. U.S. readers may well ask what all the critical tizzy is about. In The Woman of Rome, Moravia has blended poverty and lust with considerable technical skill, but, given Adriana's temperament, his bid for deeper meanings, e.g., human helplessness caught in life's iron grip, was doomed from the start...
...Business Sense. Moravia dwells on only five years of Adriana's life in mid-'30s Rome. Already luscious at 16, she lived in a depressing slum with her widowed, seamstress mother. Mama had no intention of letting her daughter get tied up with hard work or tied down to marriage with a man of her class. She got her a job as a model, made it clear that she didn't mind Adriana sleeping out "as long as they paid her." After a couple of non-professional affairs, streetwalking followed fast...
Novelist Moravia (who anomalously gives his unschooled protagonist his own clarity of thought and narration) has peppered The Woman of Rome with flashes of wisdom that seem like borrowed pearls as simple Adriana threads them: "We never get clear, definite changes in life; and those who do make hurried changes risk seeing their old habits come to the fore once again, still alive and as deep-rooted as ever." Those who want to read universal meanings into this couch-worn tale will have to do it at the level of amorality where only the Adrianas of the world can move...