Pincherle, Alberto 1907-1990
PINCHERLE, Alberto 1907-1990
PERSONAL: Born November 28, 1907, in Rome, Italy; died of a cerebral hemorrhage, September 26, 1990, in Rome, Italy; son of Carlo (an architect and a painter) and Teresa (de Marsanich) Pincherle; married Elsa Morante (a writer), 1941 (divorced); married Dacia Maraini (a novelist), 1963 (marriage ended); married Carmen Llera, 1985. Education: Awarded high school diploma after passing equivalency tests, 1967.
CAREER: Writer. Part-time editor for a publishing house. State Department lecturer in tour of U.S., 1955; lecturer at Queens College of the City University of New York, and other schools, 1964 and 1968.
MEMBER: International PEN (president, 1959), American Academy of Arts and Letters (honorary member), National Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary member).
AWARDS, HONORS: Corriere Lombardo Prize, 1945, for Agostino; Strega Literary Prize and Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur (France), both 1952; Marzotto Award for Fiction, 1954; Viarreggio Prize, 1961, for La Noia; Commander de la Legion d'Honneur (France), 1984.
WRITINGS:
novels; as alberto moravia
Gli indifferenti (also see below), Alpes (Milan, Italy), 1929, reprinted, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1976, translation by Aida Mastrangelo of original edition published as The Indifferent Ones, Dutton (New York, NY), 1932, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Time of Indifference, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1953, reprinted, Greenwood (Westport, CT), 1975, translation by Tami Calliope published as The Time of Indifference, Steerforth Italia (South Royalton, VT), 2000.
Le ambizioni sbagliate, Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 1935, translation by Arthur Livington published as The Wheel of Fortune, Viking (New York, NY), 1937, translation by Angus Davidson published as Mistaken Ambitions, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1955.
La mascherata (also see below), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1941, reprinted, 1981, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Fancy Dress Party, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1947, reprinted, 1974.
Agostino: Romanzo, Documento (Rome), 1944, translation by Beryle de Zoete published in Two Adolescents: The Stories of Agostino and Luca (also see below), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1950, published as Two Adolescents: Agostino and Disobedience (also see below), Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1952.
Due cortigiane [and] Serata di Don Giovanni (novellas), L'Acquario (Rome, Italy), 1945.
La romana, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1947, translation by Lydia Holland published as The Woman of Rome, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1949, reprinted, Manor Books (New York, NY), 1973.
La disubbidienza, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1948, reprinted, 1981, translation by Angus Davidson of original edition published as Disobedience, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1950, translation also published in Two Adolescents: The Stories of Agostino and Luca, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1950, published as Two Adolescents: Agostino and Disobedience, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1952.
Il conformista, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1951, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Conformist, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1951, Greenwood (Westport, CT), 1975, translation by Tami Calliope published as The Conformist, Steer-forth Italia (South Royalton, VT), 1999.
Il disprezzo, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1954, translation by Angus Davidson published as A Ghost at Noon, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1955, reprinted, with an introduction by Tim Parks, published as Contempt, New York Review Books (New York, NY), 1999.
Five Novels by Alberto Moravia: Mistaken Ambitions, Agostino, Luca, Conjugal Love, [and] A Ghost at Noon (also see below), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1955.
La ciociara, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1957, translation by Angus Davidson published as Two Women, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1958.
La noia, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1963, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Empty Canvas, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1965, reprinted, with an introduction by William Weaver, published as Boredom, New York Review Books (New York, NY), 1999.
L'attenzione: Romanzo, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1965, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Lie, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1966.
Io et lui, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1971, translation by Angus Davidson published as Two: A Phallic Novel, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1972, published as The Two of Us, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1972.
La vita interiore, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1978, translation by Angus Davidson published as Time of Desecration, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1980.
1934, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1982, translation by William Weaver published under same title, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1982.
La tempesta (novella), Pellicanolibri (Catania, Italy), 1984.
L'uomo che guarda, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1985, translation by Tim Parks published as The Voyeur: A Novel, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1986.
Journey to Rome, translation by Tim Parks, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1990.
La donna leopardo, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1991.
short stories; as alberto moravia
La bella vita, Carabba (Lanciano, Italy), 1935, published as La bella vita: L'Italia del consenso in undici racconti, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1976.
L'imbroglio, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1937.
I sogni del pigro, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1940.
L'amante infelice, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1943.
L'epidemia: Racconti surrealistici e satirici, Documento (Rome, Italy), 1944.
L'amore coniugale, e altri racconti, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1949, reprinted, 1981, translation by Angus Davidson of long story entitled "L'Amore coniugale" published as Conjugal Love, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1951.
I racconti, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1952, reprinted, 1983, translation by Bernard Wall, Baptista Gilliat Smith, and Frances Frenaye published as Bitter Honeymoon, and Other Stories, Secker Warburg (London, England), 1960, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Wayward Wife, and Other Stories, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1960.
Racconti romani (originally published in the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1954, translation by Angus Davidson of selections published as Roman Tales, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1956, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1957.
Nuovi racconti romani (originally published in Corriere della Sera), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1959, reprinted, 1978, translation by Angus Davidson of selections from original edition published as More Roman Tales, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1963.
L'automa, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1963, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Fetish, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1964, published as The Fetish, and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1965.
Cortigiana stanca, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1965, published as Cortigiana stanca: Racconti, 1974.
Una cosa e una cosa, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1967, translation by Angus Davidson of selections published as Command and I Will Obey You, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1969.
Racconti, edited by Vincenzo Traverse, Appleton (New York, NY), 1968, published as Racconti di Albert Moravia, Irvington (New York, NY), 1979.
Il paradiso (also see below), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1970, translation by Angus Davidson published as Paradise and Other Stories, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1971, published as Bought and Sold, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1973.
Un'altra vita (also see below), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1973, translation by Angus Davidson published as Lady Godiva and Other Stories, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1975, translation published as Mother Love, Panther (London, England), 1976.
Boh (also see below), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1976, translation by Angus Davidson published as The Voice of the Sea and Other Stories, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1978.
La cosa e altri racconti, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1983, translation by Tim Parks published as Erotic Tales, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1985.
plays; as alberto moravia
(With Luigi Squazini) Gli indifferenti (adapted from his novel; published in Sipario [Milan], 1948), produced in Rome, 1948.
Il provino, produced in Milan, 1955.
Non approfondire (one-act), produced, 1957.
Teatro (contains La mascherata and Beatrice Cenci; also see below), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1958.
Beatrice Cenci (also see below; published in Italian in Botteghe Oscure, 1955), translation by Angus Davidson, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1965, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1966.
Il mondo e quello che e (produced in Venice, 1966; adaptation by Albert Husson produced as The World As It Is in Paris at Theatre de l'Oeuvre, October, 1969), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1966.
Il dio Kurt (two-act with prologue; produced in Rome at Municipal Theatre of Aquila, 1969), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1968.
La vita e gioco (produced in Rome, 1970), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1969.
other; as alberto moravia
La speranza: Ossi a cristianesimo e comunismo, Documento (Rome, Italy), 1944.
(Editor) Leopardi Monaldo, Viaggio di Pulcinella, Atlanta (Rome, Italy), 1945.
Opera completa, seventeen volumes, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1952–67.
Un mese in U.R.S.S., Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1958.
(With Elemire Zolla) I moralisti moderni, Garzanti (Milan, Italy), 1960.
(Editor, with Elemire Zolla) Saggi italiani, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1960.
Un'idea dell'India, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1962.
L'uomo come fine e altri saggi (essays), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1964, translation by Bernard Wall of a selection published as Man As an End—A Defense of Humanism: Literary, Social, and Political Essays, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1965.
La rivoluzione culturale in Cina ovvero il convitato di ietra, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1967, translation published as The Red Book and the Great Wall: An Impression of Mao's China, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1968.
A quale tribu appartieni?, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1972, translation by Angus Davidson published as Which Tribe do You Belong To?, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1974.
Al cinema: Centoquarantotto film d'autor (reviews), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1975.
Quando Ba Lena era tanto piccola, Lisciani e Zampetti (Teramo, Italy), 1978.
Impegno controvoglia—Saggi, articoli, interviste: Trenta-cinque anni di scritti politici, edited by Renzo Paris, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1980.
Cosma e i briganti, Sellerio (Palermo, Italy), 1980.
Lettere del Sahara, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1981.
Opera, 1927-1947, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1986.
Passeggiate africane, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1988.
(With Alain Elkann) Vita de Moravia (memoir), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1990, translation by William Weaver published as Life of Moravia, Steerforth Italia (South Roylaton, VT), 2000.
Viaggi: Articoli 1930-1990, edited by Enzo Siciliano, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1994.
Romanzi e racconti 1929-1937, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1998.
Racconti Dispersi, 1928-1951, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 2000.
Ritratto dell'artista da vecchio: conversazioni con Alberto Moravia, Minimum Fax (Rome, Italy), 2001.
Also author of numerous screenplays, including "Un colpo di pistola," 1941, "Ultimo incontro," 1951, "La provinciale," 1952, "La romana" (based on his novel), 1955, "Racconti romani" (based on his stories), 1956, "La giornata balorda," 1960, "Agostino" (based on his novel), 1962, "Le ore nude," 1964, and "L'occhio selvaggio," 1967. Foreign correspondent for La Stampa and Gazzeta del Popolo (Turin, Italy), 1930-39; film critic for La Nuova Europa, 1944-46, and for L'Espresso, 1955-90; coeditor with Alberto Carocci of bimonthly magazine, Nuovi Argomenti, 1953-90.
ADAPTATIONS: "The Wayward Wife" was made into a film by Mario Soldati and released by Embassy, 1955; La romana was filmed as The Woman of Rome, directed by Luigi Zampa, 1956; La noia was filmed as The Empty Canvas, directed by Vittorio de Sica, 1965; Gli indifferente was filmed as Time of Indifference, 1965; Il disprezzo was filmed as Le Mepris, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965; Il conformista was filmed as The Conformist, by Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970; Il dio Kurt and Racconti romani were also filmed.
SIDELIGHTS: Author of novels, short stories, plays, and essays, Alberto Pincherle, better known to the world by the pen name of Alberto Moravia, was "throughout the twentieth century … a leading figure in Italian letters … [whose] place in literary history is secure," according to Louis Kibler in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. An Italian Jew and anti-Fascist who spent many years fleeing from Fascist persecution in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, Moravia was considered a leader of the neorealist school of writing in Italy. His fiction is notable for its depiction of a world of bourgeois decadence, peopled with characters whose response to life is alienation and indifference. His work is characterized by an unsentimental portrayal of sexual relationships, stressing the unfeeling amorality of contemporary Italy.
As a child Alberto Moravia used to recount stories to himself, sometimes only interrupting them for sleep and meals. Lonely and isolated, deprived at the age of nine of a normal childhood because of tuberculosis of the bone, he took refuge in his own imagination and in books. Moravia described this illness as one of the most important events of his life; because of it he had to submit to and do things that healthy children do not usually encounter. "Our character is formed by those things we are constrained to do," he wrote later, "not by those things we do of our own accord." This enforced captivity undoubtedly encouraged the youngster in his literary career.
Although he denied being the author of a book of poems published when he was only thirteen that some reference sources attribute to him, Moravia's first book did appear while he was still a teenager. While he had planned to write a play, what emerged was a novel, Gli indifferenti. The story of Carla and her brother Michele and their gradual decline through indifference into moral indolence, the book "had one of the greatest successes in modern Italian literature," according to Joan Ross and Donald Freed in their The Existentialism of Albert Moravia. While the volume's subject matter shocked the readers of the time, it gave Moravia the thematic basis for a life's work. "More than anything [this first novel] irritated its readers by its stark portrayal of the decadence and moral rot of the middle-class Italian society of its day," noted Jane E. Cottrell in Alberto Moravia. "However, the decay of the middle class was only a secondary theme; its principal subject was the despair and alienation of people entrapped in what would later come to be known in literature as 'the absurd.' For in retrospect, Gli indifferenti can be seen as the first European existentialist novel…. Since his first novel, Moravia has explored again and again in his fiction the same ideas and themes."
In a Paris Review interview Moravia spoke about the acclaim that greeted Gli indifferenti's publication: "It was one of the greatest successes in all modern literature. The greatest actually; and I can say this with all modesty. There has never been anything like it. Certainly no book in the last fifty years has been greeted with such unanimous enthusiasm and excitement." Unfortunately, the first English edition, which appeared with the title The Indifferent Ones, was allegedly so badly translated that the book made little impact on the English-speaking world. A second translation, The Time of Indifference, fared much better. New York Times contributor Frances Keene wrote that Moravia's "ear for dialogue, for the rhythm of seemingly pointless banter, gives us the very edge of each one's weaknesses. There are no false passages even in the monologue of this book, which tears open today, as it did more than twenty years ago, the fourth wall of many a sterile menage." This translation, however, did not appear until 1953, by which time Moravia had already become known to American readers through a later novel, La romana, published in English as The Woman of Rome.
R. W. B. Lewis, writing in The Picaresque Saint, called The Woman of Rome "on balance, a distinguished piece of fiction," and found that it has a "lyrical reflectiveness" and "muffled nostalgia" which sets it apart from other realistic novels. Narrated in the first person, it reveals Moravia's competence as a craftsman as well as his gift for psychological acumen. The narrator, Adriana, is a young girl of working-class origins who turns to prostitution as a way of life. "The uniqueness of Adriana," commented Sergio Pacifici in A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature, "consists precisely in her being able to find in promiscuous love the very strength to accept with cheerfulness an otherwise sordid existence." Pacifici went on to point out that Adriana's observation that "everything was love and everything depended on love, … and if you did not have it, you could not love anyone or anything" representative of Moravia's "only genuinely positive answer to the problem of the incoherence and senselessness of life."
Moravia dealt with sex in a forthright manner in these early works. As Lewis noted, "Everything other than sex is, in the stories of Moravia, an extension of sex; or perhaps better, everything other than sex is sooner or later converted into it." Moravia was attacked for his frank treatment of sex in these early novels as well as in his later fiction. Critics have accused him of immorality, lewdness, and obsessiveness. In fact, all of his works were placed on the Index in 1952. In a letter to Lewis, Moravia admitted that "sex has been for me the key to many doors," but added that, when he first started to write, "there were only a few things which seemed to me solid and true and these things were connected with nature and the less objectionable and analysable and ineffable sides of the human soul. Among these things no doubt was sex, which is something primordial and absolute."
Despite such explanations Moravia felt the wrath of censors into his sixth decade as a writer. "Moravia has been identified with sex ever since the runaway success of Woman of Rome in 1947 established him as Italy's best-known novelist," observed Miranda Seymour in her Spectator commentary on the literary figure. "The sex-scenes in his… novel, Time of Desecration, were of such a singular nature that the French translators complained, the Italian Mary White-house rose in wrath, and the Germans, not usually known for their puritanism, flatly refused to publish the book." Commenting on the same novel, New York magazine contributor Joshua Gilder noted, "Moravia's earlier stories were often brilliant little studies of erotic compulsion. But the erotic component has steadily drained away, until all we are now left with is the compulsion. Time of Desecration readslesslikea novel than a case study of sexual pathology."
Stylistically, Moravia was not an innovator or even a particularly polished writer. Charges that he "writes badly" or even "ungrammatically" are not infrequently leveled at him. In his New York Times review of 1934 Anatole Broyard observed, "Moravia has never had what might be called a style, but now he seems to have developed what could be described as an aggressive absence of style. A sentence like 'He resumed eating with intent, choleric voracity' suggests no language at all, neither in the original Italian nor the translator's English version." Lewis found that Moravia "is usually happier with the short novel (and the short story) than with the novel proper; his resources and his themes appear to lack the variety and the inward momentum that novels require." Elaborating on this idea, Pacifici commented, "It is the less sustained genres of the short story and the novella that he has found a felicitous vehicle to dramatize, effectively and succinctly, the few themes close to his sensibility."
Offering a defense to some criticism leveled at his work, Moravia once said, "Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. Their truth is self-repeating. They keep rewriting the same book. That is to say, they keep trying to perfect their expression of the one problem they were born to understand." Nevertheless, some critics fault Moravia for his constant repetition of themes and subject matter and contend that his later works lack the tautness and vigor of his earlier fiction. Some critics have complained that Moravia is a one-book man, with his first novel, The Time of Indifference, written when he was still in his teens, containing most of what he had to say. Ross and Freed, however, believed that Moravia improved as a writer over the years. "Moravia has gone beyond the bleak, sordid vision of Time of Indifference," they noted. "In subsequent works his perception has deepened and matured. Out of this intense vision we sense a true empathy for the condition of modern man."
Erotic Tales contains twenty short stories that describe various manifestations of sexual obsession and dysfunction. Stephen Koch noted in the Washington Post Book World, "The stories are of course about wishing, wanting and (mainly not) having; they are also about guilt, domination, damnation, obsession, power, and self-surrender." In one story, "The Thing," a lesbian is irresistibly drawn into bestiality with a pony; in another, "To the Unknown God," a virginal nurse fondles her male patients. Though the collection is criticized for containing lurid content without redemptive substance, Adam Mars-Jones commended the story "The Belt," which involves a woman who instigates her husband's wrath to satisfy a perverse wish to be thrashed. Mars-Jones wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, "Moravia presents sexual behaviour not as pure negative appetite but complex symbolic negotiation, in which apparently destructive impulses may constitute a kind of victory." According to Annapaola Cancogni in the New York Times Book Review, the title of the story "The Thing" characterizes the entire collection, "at worst an obsession, at best a fetish. In any case, sex is reified, named, that is to say, mechanized, de-eroticized, theorized."
The Voyeur relates the disaffection of a left-wing Italian professor of French literature who struggles to come to terms with his father and self-identity. In defiance of bourgeois convention, Eduardo, or Dodo as he is called, refuses to subsidize his own residence and lives with his wife in his father's apartment. When his father, a famed physics professor, is bedridden with a broken thigh, a complex psychological and sexual power struggle develops between them. Dodo becomes unsettled as he realizes that his father spies on him, causing him to reflect on his own voyeuristic behavior. The story itself is recounted through Dodo's journal, providing an additional level of irony to the reader's naturally voyeuristic position. As Lucia Re observed in the New York Times Book Review, "This endless doubling of the voyeuristic perspective is the governing strategy of the novel and its principal theme." Robert Wells noted in the Times Literary Supplement that in this novel "sex is valued rather as a kind of gluttony, an impersonal expression of vitality which succeeds, where the intellectual's understanding fails, in challenging the crushing anticipation of catastrophe." Susan Slocum Hinerfeld concluded in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "Moravia is a fine, wise writer. There is much to learn from his book. This time the master's tongue is in cheek, his book satyric and satiric."
In Journey to Rome Moravia describes the homecoming of Mario, a young Italian boy raised in France, to see his father after a fifteen-year lapse. While in his father's apartment, Mario is haunted by a sudden childhood memory of his mother engaged in adulterous intercourse with his father's business partner. To relieve his psychic distress Mario resolves to re-enact the scenario, but must find a surrogate since his mother is dead. Nick Hornby wrote in the Listener, "Journey to Rome is a novel about the sexual patterns into which we become locked, and is as neatly and wittily constructed as one would expect from Moravia." A Books reviewer concluded that it is an "intelligent, erotic and funny black comedy." Christopher Duggan noted in an Observer review that the novel is "consistently entertaining, and can claim an intellectual core … in its exploration of memory, the unconscious, and desire." Moravia's final novel, La donna leoparado (title means "The Leopard Woman") is "unique," according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Kibler, not only because it is set outside Italy, but also because it is absent of the usual Moravian fixation on "voyeurism, Oedipal complexes, incest, and adolescent girls," as Kibler further noted. A tale of marital infidelity, the novel is also "less original" in theme, Kibler felt.
Apart from his novels, novellas, and short stories, Moravia wrote several plays, hundreds of film reviews, and published several collections of essays. Man As an End, the first group of his essays to appear in English, was well received by reviewers. Moravia was a trenchant polemicist; his essays, whether philosophical, political, or critical will always provoke and stimulate. The prevailing feeling is, however, that his position in literature will be determined by his shorter fiction among which there are, perhaps, one or two near masterpieces, such as Agostino. A Time contributor once called him "one of the best writers in the world today," and Pacifici suggested that, if Moravia does rank with the genuine artists of our century, it is because "after years of writing, and despite the fact that time itself has not changed in any substantial way the manner of his writing, he has come closer to saying something about the condition of modern man."
Moravia died in Rome in September of 1990, and his body lay in state in the city hall of the Italian capital, a rare honor for a literary personality. Kibler concluded that "as a chronicler of twentieth-century Italy, Moravia has no peer. He was attuned to the times in which he lived and to the spirit of his culture. His novels reflect and at times define problems and concerns of his contemporaries." Despite such critical acclaim, interest in Moravia's books appeared to wain for a time in the United States. Six years after his death, there were no English translations in print. However, beginning in 1999, several publishers began reissuing such classics as Contempt, The Conformist, The Woman of Rome, and his first novel, The Time of Indifference, several of them in new translations. Also appearing in 2000 was Moravia's autobiography as told to Alain Elkann in a series of interviews. Originally published in Italy in 1990, the translation, Life of Moravia, as well as new translations of his novels renewed intererst in this twentieth-century writer enough for Michael Rogers to declare in Library Journal that "Moravia is red hot!"
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
books
Chiaromente, Nicola, The Worm of Consciousness, and Other Essays, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1976.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2, 1974, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 27, 1984, Volume 46, 1988.
Cottrell, Jane E., Alberto Moravia, Unger (New York, NY), 1974.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 177: Italian Novelists since World War II, 1945-1965, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997, pp. 197-217.
Heiney, D. W., Three Italian Novelists, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1968.
Lewis, R. W. B., The Picaresque Saint, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1959.
Pacifici, Sergio, A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature, Meridian Books (New York, NY), 1962.
Peterson, Thomas E., Alberto Moravia, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1996.
Ragusa, Olga, Narrative and Drama: Essays in Modern Italian Literature from Verga to Pasolini, Humanities, 1976.
Ross, Joan, and Donald Freed, The Existentialism of Alberto Moravia, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1972.
periodicals
American Journal of Italian Studies, fall, 2000, M. John Stella, "Boredom As a Positive Reality in La noia," p. 90.
Architectural Digest, March, 1988, p. 210.
Atlantic, February, 1955.
Best Sellers, July 15, 1969.
Booklist, November 15, 2000, Bonnie Smothers, review of The Time of Indifference and Life of Moravia, p. 611.
Books, July-August, 1990, review of Journey to Rome, p. 12.
Books Abroad, autumn, 1950; summer, 1969; winter, 1971.
Books and Bookmen, July, 1969.
Book Week, April 17, 1966.
Book World, September 22, 1968.
Christian Science Monitor, July 17, 1969.
Commonweal, October 22, 1965.
Connoisseur, August, 1991, p. 52.
Economist, October 6, 1990, p. 110.
Harper's Magazine, June, 1987, p. 37.
Italica, summer, 2003, Natasha V. Chang, "Moravia's Indifferent Bodies," p. 209.
Library Journal, September 15, 1999, Michael Rogers, review of Boredom, p. 117; November 1, 1999, Michael Rogers, review of The Woman of Rome, p. 130; January, 2000, Michael Rogers, review of The Conformist and Contempt, p. 173; October 1, 2000, Michael Rogers, review of The Time of Indifference, p. 153.
Life, April 28, 1972.
Listener, November 21, 1968; July 19, 1990, Nick Hornby, review of Journey to Rome, p. 27.
London Magazine, October, 1968.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 10, 1987, Susan Slocum Hinerfeld, review of The Voyeur, p. 2.
Modern Fiction Studies, number 3, 1958.
Modern Language Journal, Volume 26, 1952.
Nation, April 5, 1971.
New Leader, April 19, 1971.
New Republic, October 26, 1968.
New Statesman, January 24, 2000, Edward Platt, review of The Conformist, p. 57.
New York, May 23, 1983.
New Yorker, May 7, 1955.
New York Herald Tribune Book Review, October 7, 1951.
New York Review of Books, January 16, 1969.
New York Times, May 24, 1953; January 19, 1966; May 9, 1968; September 19, 1970; March 21, 1971; May 8, 1972; May 11, 1983.
New York Times Book Review, August 3, 1950; April 17, 1953; May 23, 1965; February 9, 1969; May 17, 1970; January 5, 1986, Annapaola Cancogni, review of Erotic Tales, p. 6; March 29, 1987, Lucia Re, review of The Voyeur, p. 15.
Observer, December 22, 1985; November 23, 1986; July 1, 1990, Christopher Duggan, review of Journey to Rome, October 3, 1993.
Paris Review, summer, 1954.
People, May 18, 1987, Campbell Geeslin, review of The Voyeur, p. 12.
Publishers Weekly, September 25, 2000, review of Life of Moravia, p. 103.
Saturday Review, August 23, 1969; February 13, 1971.
Spectator, November 15, 1968; November 16, 1985.
Stage, July 5, 1973.
Time, June 11, 1965; October 18, 1968.
Times Literary Supplement, September 20, 1965; September 19, 1968; June 5, 1969; December 20, 1985, Adam Mars-Jones, review of Erotic Tales, p. 1464; November 14, 1986, Robert Wells, review of The Voyeur, p. 1290.
Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1953.
Washington Post Book World, January 26, 1986, Stephen Koch, review of Erotic Tales, p. 8.
obituaries
periodicals
Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1990.
New York Times, September 27, 1990; September 29, 1990.
Times (London, England), September 27, 1990.
Washington Post, September 27, 1990.*