Alberto Moravia's Novel "1934"

Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) was the internationally best-known Italian writer between Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) and Italo Calvino (1923-1985) '" and in Italy, between Cesar Pavese (1908-1950) and Calvino, whose fame continued to grow after his death. Moravia's most important novel, The Conformist (first published in 1951)was adapted to the screen by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970. Other Moravia novels had been brought to the screen in the early 1960s by Jean-Luc Godard (Le Mepris/Contempt from The Ghost at Noon), Vittorio de Sica (Two Women), and others. His books were on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books and also suppressed (particularly the brilliant 1941 novella Agostino) by the fascists in Italy. (Moravia and his wife novelist Elsa Morante had to go into hiding in the last years of fascist rule.)

I read half a dozen Moravia novels during the early 1970s. His American reputation went into near total eclipse until a few years ago when the New York Review Press returned The Conformist and Boredom (originally published here as The Empty Canvas '" La Noia in Italian) to print. I read (and wrote about) Boredom, and picked up the novel 1934, thinking that it had been written then. I guess I was expecting something akin to the account contemporary to the happenings of Irene N©mirovsky's Suite Francaise, but 1934 was written long after 1934, published in Italian in 1982 and in English in 1983. There is a story in the middle that resembles Nemirovsky's The Courilof Affair, relating an assassination plot in pre-revolutionary Russia, but from what I have been reading recently, 1934 is closest to Thomas Mann's novella Mario and the Magician, involving German visitors to fascist Italy and twisted (into grotesquerie) sexual politics.

The narrator, Lucio, is an Italian who had written a doctoral dissertation in Germany on the Romantic German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). On the boat from Naples to Capri makes and holds eye contact with a married red-headed German woman '" to the annoyance of her husband. Lucio books himself into the same Anacapri pensione (Damecuta) as the couple and pursues a relationship with the woman named Beate with some connivance of her ardent Nazi husband, Herr M¼ller. Herr M¼ller is also an ardent photographer and at one point permits Lucio to photograph Beate in the nude on the beach. Lucio is something beyond fascinated by red pubic hair... and by Beate's quest for a partner in a love suicide, like Kleist's.

Lucio is trying to "stabilize" his despair and write a novel about someone committing suicide rather than giving in an killing himself. He does not foresee the fascists falling from power over Italy and is appalled by the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, notably Beate's twin sister Trude, who along with her mother Paula is committed to the Nazi party and to Hitler as the savior of the German people(s). Lucio is fascinated by the hearty, earthy double of the fastidious anti-Nazi Beate and overcomes his repugnance at having to prove he has a foreskin. (There is a lot of heterosexual fellatio in the novel and speculation about a lesbian liaison, as well.)

I have read Kleist's letters and Nietzche's Thus Sprach Zarathustra, both of which are frequently mentioned in 1934, although I don't think any previous familiarity with either is necessary to understand what the characters do with those 19th-century texts.

BTW, Moravia was lecturing in the US in 1934. In that he frequently wrote about ennui, I would infer that he shared some experience of it with the narrators of 1934 and Boredom. Unlike the makers of the movie "The Illusionist," Moravia does not make me feel cheated by revelations at the end, because the reader learns what Lucio does in the same order as he did. He does not purport to have any special flashes of insight and seems a reliable narrator of what he felt and learned of the Germans (and the Russian ex-terrorist) on Capri.

I thought that the book went on too long (297) pages with too many self-questionings. If it was supposed to be a "novel of ideas," the ideas are undeveloped and not very interesting (e.g., ''it requires a great deal of vitality to take your life."), though discoursing about ideas of suicide and literary notions of love occupy more space than the characters do. Perhaps this lack of enthusiasm on my part is a more a statement about the attenuation of my attention span the long-windedness of Moravia in one of his last novels.

Still, I think that there is more punch in Mario and the Magician in a lot fewer pages and am not sure why I persisted in reading through the whole book. Lucio is a very insipid anti-fascist and the only interesting character (IMO) is Sonia, the Russian noblewoman turned terrorist turned guardian of an art collection.

Germans' stereotypical views of Italian (male) character and of German national character play important parts in motivation and plot, and intercultural misunderstanding is a subject of seemingly endless interest to me.

I've also written about Moravi'a autobiography here and about Lily Tuck's biography of Moravia's wife and fellow novelist Elsa Morante here.

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