Two Friends

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Alberto Moravia (1907–1980) was Italy’s most successful novelist of the twentieth century. A prolific author of fiction, theatre, essays, film criticism, and travel correspondence, Moravia remained until his death a cultural icon and presence in Italian public life. A master of the novel and short story, he created characters who typically were embroiled in problems of money and sex interrelated in ingenious plots that reveal the moral weakness of ordinary people caught in predicaments of their own making. At the same time, there are protagonists in Moravia’s tales who evoke empathy and admiration; these are humble and heroic characters who resist the alienating forces of modern society.

Moravia’s first novel, Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929) was a tragicomic portrait of a Roman family that many saw as an indictment of the Fascist elite, but which the author maintained was an honest picture “from within” of his own world. The precocious work depicts that world in spare, acrid prose, unforgiving in its existential rendering of a dysfunctional family that is “indifferent” to the higher values of humanistic culture. Moravia achieved great success after World War II with the short novel Agostino (1945). Based on the contemporaneous discovery of sexuality and social awareness by a pre-adolescent boy on a summer beach vacation with his mother, this was the first of a series of highly successful works that would firmly establish Moravia’s literary reputation. Equally successful was the monumental La romana (The Woman of Rome, 1947), a lengthy novel written over four months between 1946 and 1947 and based on a brief experience from ten years earlier when Moravia encountered a beautiful young prostitute who was assisted in her profession by her mother.

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