Volume 30, Number 11 · June 30, 1983
Victims of Politics
By Stephen Spender
1934
by Alberto Moravia, translated by William Weaver
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 297 pp., $14.50
Moravia's latest novel is haunted by German ghosts: Dürer, Kleist, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kafka, and the voice of Hitler, which is heard through loudspeakers. Lucio, the narrator, goes to Anacapri after taking a degree at the University of Munich with a thesis on Heinrich von Kleist. He has brought his German dictionary with him, since he is translating Kleist's famous novella Michael Kohlhaas into Italian. He is also writing a novel in which the hero, obviously a self-portrait, commits suicide. Lucio has suffered 'from a form of anguish that consisted, precisely, of hoping for nothing.' His mind 'frequently played with the solution of suicide…as the logical, inevitable outcome of lack of hope.' However, the 98 percent of him that is not mind, but, like the rest of us, animal, opposes the solution of suicide, though this is 'not strong enough to dispel despair.'
Review, 2149 words
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