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"A thirteen-year-old boy spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort feels displaced in his beautiful widowed mother's affections by her cocksure new companion and strays into the company of some local young toughs and their unsettling leader, a fleshy older boatman with six fingers on each hand. Initially repelled by their squalor and brutality, repeatedly humiliated for his well-bred frailty and above all for his ingenuousness in matters of women and sex, the boy nonetheless finds himself masochistically drawn back to the gang's rough games. And yet what he has learned is too much for him to assimilate; instead of the manly calm he had hoped for he is beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother still. Alberto Moravia's classic and yet still startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1941 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a sparkling new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to enthrall and astonish a twenty-first-century audience"--… (more)
User reviews
This is a short novel. The story is simple, not even necessarily original (a Freudian coming-of-age tale). But... it was fun to read. I was immediately drawn into Agostino's world. I wanted to keep reading it.
This is style.
I don't recall anymore why I wanted to read this book; I have a dim memory of reading an article about essential books in translation to read. So when I actually got around to reading it, I didn't really have any particular expectations. The book is really more of a novella, clocking in at just a hundred pages. Somehow it still felt long in a way though; perhaps because nothing much really happens in the book. Nominally, it is a "coming of age" type story for Agostino, except that becoming a man for him simply means sexual relations, not anything else about responsibility or awareness of the world. Arguably, there is something contained within the book about class distinctions, but it is slight (and not flattering for anyone depicted). Mostly, the narrative is just full of Agostino's angst about how he's suddenly aware that his mother has a life outside of being a mother, aka that she also has sexual desire. Poor Agostino (in sarcasm).
Moravio's prose reads smoothly and evocatively, and a note from the translator puts his writing into context, explaining how Moravio was trying something new for 1940s Italy -- a break away from the classical and lyrical style based on poetry with a more realistic, colloquial bent. Still, I didn't enjoy this book all the much and I'm not sure I would recommend it, even though it was an award winner back in its day. The sexist attitude toward women in general and the mother (literally how she is referred to all the time -- the mother, with no name) in particular were off-putting. Men don't get a much better portrait, with the wild and violent boys depicted: "He found it utterly unjust that on such a sea, beneath such a sky, a boat like theirs should be so full of spite, cruelty, and malicious corruption. A boat overflowing with boys acting like monkeys, gesticulating and obscene, helmed by the blissful and bloated Saro, created between the sea and sky a sad unbelievable vision." It's not a pretty view of humanity, and it's certainly not a feel-good kind of book by any stretch.