Volume 27, Number 13 · August 14, 1980
Moravia's Victims
By Robert M. Adams
Time of Desecration
by Alberto Moravia, translated by Angus Davidson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 376 pp., $12.95
Alberto Moravia has been quoted as saying that most novelists have just one story to tell, which they repeat over and over with different variations and colorings—with different accidents, so to speak, but always the same substance. Whether or not this is true about novelists in general, it certainly is true of Alberto Moravia. He has been telling his story for fifty years now, in narratives of many different sizes and shapes. Between the ages of nine and seventeen he apparently underwent a deplorably unproductive period, but when he was eighteen he wrote Gli Indifferenti (it was not published till three years later), and he has suffered few dry spells since. La Vita Interiore, his most recent fiction, is announced as his last; the translator has retitled it in English Time of Desecration, presumably to point up a parallel with that far-off first novel, which was published in English as The Time of Indifference. The parallel is genuine and interesting, but shouldn't be allowed to obscure the qualities of the present book, which has strong claims of its own.
Review, 2579 words
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