Negentienvierendertig

"She gave an affirmative signal with her eyes, as if to tell me, yes, I had to respond to the salute. Was it an order or a plea? I couldn't have said. Surely, at that moment, it would be an act of complicity at a level far deeper than that of political opportunism. But what most convinced me to act

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in a fashion so opposed to my convictions was the thought that she was asking me to do it 'for love of her.' Somehow, with that affirmative sign of her eyes and head, she was saying to me: Yes, only for a moment, to please me, become a Fascist."

A moody young man locks eyes with a beautiful young woman. He believes that she's possessed by the same despair that torments him, the despair that he longs to "stabilize" (by which he maybe means "write about it in his novel"). He falls in love instantly (as the moody young men so often do), but the woman is on holiday with her husband, and so the two embark upon a bizarre courtship consisting of glances, stares, and underlined passages of Nietzsche.

In general, I have little tolerance for the moody young men and their infatuations, and I tire quickly of the breathless descriptions of the stunning creatures that so captivate them. But this book is so much more than that--what begins as a coup de foudre evolves, through Moravia's steady, elegant (and even surprising) storytelling, into an exploration of psychology, desire, and politics in the darkening shadow of fascism. It's very twentieth-century and very modernist in a lot of ways, but it's still surprising and uncomfortably real.

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