Alberto Moravia

On a whim, I picked up Alberto Moravia's Agostino. And I must say: what a cruel little book. 

Banned for a time under Italy's fascist regime of the 1940s, Agostino is a novella - on the surface, at least - about adolescence. Pop that veneer, though, and this is a book far less about the transition to adulthood and more about that violent moment of recognition, when admiration turns into affection, loyalty into jealousy. 

Moravia's world is a dark one. The thirteen year-old Agostino is bullied by a gang of working class youth who expose him to all that is coarse and vile: the youth belittle Agostino, while targeting his mother as the object of their collective - sexual - desire. That abuse propels Agostino into a period of tumult and self-doubt: over the nature of his relationship with his mother, over her interactions with her suitors, and over his own sexual awakening. 

The book is unrelenting in its insistence that the journey to adulthood is full of violence: whether that manifests itself physically (as it does in the form of class conflict to which Moravia alludes) or as psychological trauma (in the Freudian sense of those words). Moravia has constructed a universe of contrasts: one of sensuality and arousal, but one also of frustration and fear. The book, I think, hasn't aged as well as some might suggest (based on the translator's note in the NYRB edition), but there are, still, things to like: the insistence on psychological upheaval as well as the pursuit of that moment when boyhood transforms into something else, something darker. 

Moravia hinted at the influence of both Marx and Freud on his writing, and it's clear that the novella owes a considerable amount to the pair. 

The last word is for Moravia:

"'You always treat me like a baby,' Agostino said all at once, not even he knew why.

The mother laughed and patted him on the cheek. 'All right, then, from now on I'll treat you like a man.'"