Boredom

By Alberto Moravia
Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson
Introduction by William Weaver

The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a writer who, as Anthony Burgess once remarked, was "always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio."

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

In its moral and artistic economy, [Boredom] is perhaps the most successful of all Moravia's works.... No one has depicted a series of carnal acts, frenzied yet cold in their automatism—nudity, desire and its outlet—with such complete lack of complacence, such impassive truthfulness.
— Nicola Chiaromonte, Partisan Review

Also see:

Contempt By Alberto Moravia Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson Introduction by Tim Parks All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage.

The Moon and the Bonfires By Cesare Pavese Translated from the Italian by R.W. Flint Introduction by Mark Rudman The Moon and the Bonfires is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years.

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