This English translation by Michael F. Moore is of the 1945
classic, coming-of-age novella, Agostino, by the late Italian novelist Alberto
Moravia, which is why I requested a review-copy of this book.
From the first lines of the book, we know that
thirteen-year-old Agostino views his mother more like a girl-friend than a
mother. He loves others to admire her
beauty while she is with him, feeling special being her special companion. He dislikes men sharing their company, since
they are possible rivals for his mother's attention. He loves the intimacy of their relationship
when they vacation together by the seaside.
The author calls the son's affection for his mother what it
is: an infatuation.
...the intensity of his filial vanity and the turmoil
of his infatuation would linger for many years to come.
Agostino is a highly self-conscious, observant boy, with
emotions that tend to possessiveness and humiliation.
He also has masochistic tendencies that he
indulges with his mother and some beach boys.
The novella was adapted to film in 1962, in Italian. Here is an old trailer for that film:
The teenager is coming-of-age, but the man he is to become
is not one he necessarily likes. The
story of his coming-of-age is told in clear, strong prose. The details shared with the reader draw a
picture of what is happening on the beach, and what is happening inside
Agostino's young mind.
Moravia's writing skill is sure and firm and confident,
without being pompous or flowery. The
dialogue of the beach boys and their actions are realistic and reminiscent of the
book Lord of the Flies, which depicted the uncivilized, sadist life of children
left on their own.
There is always an uncomfortable, underlying, unspoken
feeling of threat in the story. One
feels Agostino is just a step away from disaster, either with his
mother, or with his new-found "friends". I recall having the same feeling while
reading the classic short-story The Lottery, about a sadistic
lottery in a small American town.
Sexuality that was, obliviously, all around him all his
thirteen years suddenly becomes clear to Agostino, in uncomfortable and awkward
ways. Puberty strikes!
The dark realization came to him that a difficult and
miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end.
The hardest part of all this is Agostino's relationship with his
oblivious mother, a widow who is too used to living alone with her son, that
she has forgotten about modesty. Her
teenaged Agostino is made increasingly uncomfortable by his mother's immodesty and unrestrained
sexuality.
Sometimes he wondered how older boys, knowing what he
knew, could still love their mothers.
The summer and Agostino's association with the rough group of beach boys
transforms Agostino into a young man who is uncomfortable in both his
high-class world, and in the rough, crude world of the poor. Agostino is lost somewhere in between the two
classes.
Agostino is also full of self-loathing for his sexual
feelings toward his mother, causing him to debase himself and to embrace
deceit. He is left longing to become a
man, a euphemism for a sexual man, for sexual relations with women, hoping that
will stop him from desiring his mother.
Yes, Freud had a great influence on Moravia! As did growing
up an Italian male in a society where mothers often turned to their sons for
emotional support, rather to their unfaithful, macho husbands.
The translation is wonderful, communicating the force of Moravia's powerful, un-embellished prose. The biggest compliment one can give a translation is that it doesn't read like a translation, and that is the case with Agostino, translated from the original Italian by Michael F. Moore.
From the book's description, which gives rather too much
away:
A thirteen-year-old boy spending the summer at a Tuscan
seaside resort feels displaced in his beautiful widowed mother’s affections by
her cocksure new companion and strays into the company of some local young
toughs and their unsettling leader, a fleshy older boatman with six fingers on
each hand. Initially repelled by their squalor and brutality, repeatedly
humiliated for his well-bred frailty and above all for his ingenuousness in
matters of women and sex, the boy nonetheless finds himself masochistically
drawn back to the gang’s rough games. And yet what he has learned is too much
for him to assimilate; instead of the manly calm he had hoped for he is beset
by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of
troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother still.
Alberto Moravia’s classic and yet still startling portrait of innocence lost
was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until
1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary
prize of his career. Revived here in a sparkling new translation by Michael F.
Moore, Agostino is poised to enthrall and astonish a twenty-first-century
audience.
An innovative list of fiction and nonfiction for discerning and adventurous readers
Here are direct links to Agostino at Amazon.com, to this English translation and to the original Italian edition, and to a collection of Moravia novels which includes Agostino.
