Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Alberto Moravia and William Weaver - Boredom
It's easy to understand that the original American publisher of Angus Davidson's translation of "La Noia" by Alberto Moravia (1907-90 and in 1961 the living Italian writer with the greatest name recognition in North America) squirmed away from "Boredom" as a title. The title is not a warning that the book is boring. Rather, it is about a man who is bored by everything, starting with the wealth that his widowed mother is eager to share with him. Well, the book doesn't start with that. It starts with his dissatisfaction with a painting he has done. He slashes it into the proverbial ribbons and puts a blank canvas on the easel, planning to give up painting and not befoul another one. Hence the title of the original American edition: The Empty Canvas.
In some ways, the ennui of Dino, the narrator, fits with the alienation and sense of sterility of the nouveau riche characters in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini from the same era. Dino finds it difficult to feel that anything (people or objects) has any reality... and his painted compositions he also finds lacking in reality, despite their abstractness. Another bad painter in the same building, Balestrieri finds fulfillment--or at least regular arousal--in painting nude women in contorted positions, and Dino inherits the young and very sexual Cecilia when the older man dies (more or less killing himself through sex--foreshadowing the 1980s!).
Cecilia is very sexually available, but Dino wants to possess her in ways that are impossible. He craves to know what she feels, but she is completely unintrospective and cannot tell him. The reader of Proust suspects that Albertine, the uncapturable (even in remembrance) quarry of his narrator, Marcel, takes some enjoyment in making Marcel jealous and frustrated. Cecilia would prefer not to make the effort to lie or hide her "infidelity." She is completely willing to tell Dino what she did with her previous painter or that she is also having sex with an actor who lives near the Spanish Steps. There is really no need for him to tail her, though IMO he doesn't have anything better to do and takes some masochistic joy--or at least an interest--in confirming his suspicions.
Moravia makes me sympathetic to Dino's mother who tolerates her son's lack of filial devotion. She is a socialite who entertains cabinet ministers and is managing a growing fortune (in which Dino takes less than no interest, though taking an allowance from her). She is resigned to a loveless existence. I rather like her and don't see that she does anything to deserve so unloving and ungrateful a son.
Cecilia is too lacking in subjectivity to generate much sympathy. One may feel sorry for her obliviousness--she notices nothing and is blanker than Monica Vitti in the Antonioni "alienation tetraology." North Americans now may be outraged that she is underage (I'm not sure of her age or what the age of consent was in Italy in 1960), but she seems amply rewarded to me. (Cecilia's mother and Balestrieri's widow are sympathetic characters, but are around even less than Dino's mother is in the book.)
Although the characters foreshadow those of post-neorealist Italian cinema of the 1960s, Boredom is not anti-narrative in what became the Antonioni manner and the French "new novel" of the day (brought to the screen by Alain Resnais). There is an interiority, the subjectivity of Dino. He is bemused by his failures, in the tradition of Zeno's Conscience and Emilio's Carnival (Italo Svevo) and The Late Mattia Pascal (Luigi Pirandello), as well as the aforementioned thwartedly possessive Marcel of Proust's chronicle. The self-lacerating musings are rendered in simpler syntax than Svevo (let alone Proust) and the development is chronological (except for what Dino can elicit from Cecilia about the path of obsession Balestrieri went down). For me Boredom is sometimes quite funny, though the humorousness of his absurdities are lost on Dino.
Moravia, as in the novels that became major arthouse films of the 1960s (The Ghost at Noon which became "Le Mépris"/"Contempt," directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Two Women in which Vittorio De Sica directed Sophia Loren to an Oscar, and The Conformist brought to the screen by Bernardo Bertolucci), was a rather chilly observer of lust and other human follies. He seemed forgotten during the 1980s and 90s, eclipsed by the cults of Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Umberto Eco, and (more recently) Alessandro Baricco. The New York Review series has reprinted The Ghost at Noon (as Contempt) and other Moravia books, including The Conformist and Conjugal Love have returned to being in print in the US during this millennium. I think this makes Boredom a particularly apt choice for Msmorvay's 5th Resurrecting the Oldies writeoff.
The NYR edition has an introduction to Moravia by William Weaver (who has translated many Italian novles) that should be useful to those unfamiliar with his work (I read other Moravia fiction while I was in high school and college, which is to say long, long ago).
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