During (and a few decades after) the wars Moravia was probably the most widely-known Italian novelist in English-speaking countries. The Conformist and Contempt have been made into films by Bertolucci and Godard. Then there’s also the friendship with Pasolini (another Italian chap I regard with the same mix of repulsion & reverence). Yet these days one hardly heard of him, jostled by popular favourites such as Eco and Calvino. Perhaps all his realistic pessimism sealed him into old days’ obscurity? Perhaps.

So enter NYRB’s enthusiastic revival of ‘underappreciated’ authors. And a recent adaptation of Boredom, L’Ennui by Cedric Kahn. While! To the coquettish delights of my scanty collection of Moravias, a newly-acquired ‘vintage’: Conjugal Love.

Uh-huh, that pulp/harlequin/strumpet-looking thing on the right. However NYRB tries to convince us otherwise, we all know that Moravia was a dirty old man. No use pretending.

There is a shitload of authors who repeat their characters and themes over and over again (“You read one you read ‘em all”, although that doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s a bad thing), and Moravia is one of them. The recurrent themes—alienation, impossibility of communication, sex, etc.—are, well, “join the 20th century!” most exploited humdrums. But unlike, say, Murakami, Kafka (and his shitloads of -esque progenies), nothing strange (or “post-modern”) happens, no casual eccentricities dot the events, and his characters do not wear a Meursaultian indifference. They shamelessly brood, analyzing for pages the most banal trifles with dedicated fondness. Actions are scarce, plot so simple it’s foreshadowed, it’s all in the thoughts.

In that sense, Conjugal Love could very well be the predecessor of Boredom. A bleak, realistic comic of a failed dilletante-cum-writer/artist, frustrated by his incapability to relate with the world, repulsed by his superficiality, impotence and delusion:

To me, both creative art and my wife were granted only through pity, through affection, benevolence, reasoned goodwill; the fruits of this concession would never be either love or poetry, but merely a process of forced, decorous composition, a tepid, chaste felicity.

And always, with as incisive a repugnance as sad a resigned humour, scrutinises every single trifle, along with his own pathetic inescapibility:

I realized that the failure of my book foreshadowed the far wider failure of my whole life, and I felt that my whole being rebelled against this result. It is impossible to describe what I felt—the acute sense of a sudden crumbling to pieces, of a headlong plunge into absurdity and emptiness. Above all, I rebelled against the picture of myself provided by my book. I did not want to be a trifler, an incompetent, a weakling. And yet I knew that, just because I rebelled against it, this picture was a true one.

Like I said, self-loathing smut. Ample instant-gratifying fixes that are both desperate and funny for all those too-familiar angst-dwelling nights!

And Angus Davidson did fine translating jobs.

But! One problem (for me at least): why, WHY, must he ruin it, at the last few pages?! It’s like hackneying an askewed, anticlimatical ending because he just couldn’t finish it. Boredom (aka The Empty Canvas) was better handled, but there’s the same treacherous anticlimax in these endings that abruptly pulls you from his previous explicating whirlpool and leaves you… disoriented. Suddenly all traces of anguish seem confusingly out of place before you can even say, “I want my angst back!”

Maybe for the next book of his I read, I should stop a few pages before the end.

PS: I vaguely remember that The Woman of Rome is available in Indonesian. Not sure about other titles.

Conjugal Love
by Alberto Moravia
Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson
Ace Books, 1958

Boredom
a.k.a Blank Canvas
by Alberto Moravia
Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson
Introduction by William Weaver
New York Review Books Classics (September 9, 2004)