Agostino

(Paperback, Main)

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Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother. Alberto Moravia's classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 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 new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.

Reviews

Michael F. Moore has given us a wonderful new translation of a classic coming-of-age story set in the modern world. His translation is seamless and loyal to the original yet updated enough to appeal to contemporary readers. -- Andrew Martino, World Literature Today ...psychologically brilliant...Only Moravia could have written such a nasty and perfect 'beach read. Harper's Magazine ...this dreamy, haunting study of a young boy's painful initiation into sexual consciousness is so psychologically rich and vividly imagined-in Moore's plangent translation-that it resembles a painting as much as a novella...Like the best of NYRB Classics' European repertoire, this book both rewards admirers of its illustrious author while providing an entry point for curious readers. Either way, the twinned landscapes of frustrated Oedipal longing and the Fascist-era coastline evoke a tainted beauty both sensuous and violent. Publishers Weekly starred review Originally published in 1945, this novel about the loss of innocence shines in a new translation...Perceptive and razor-sharp insights into the agony of adolescence. Kirkus starred review Moravia writes with spare attention; the reader becomes enraptured in this sensual world just as Agostino himself begins to take notice of it -- Nathaniel Popkin Cleaver Magazine Where Moravia excels, over and above his extraordinary understanding of the dark and confused struggles that go on in the mind of the sensitive adolescent, is the delicacy with which he handles the sex situations... Not once does he fail here; his treatment of physical love is never overcharged, either in the direction of false sentiment or with whipped-up passion. Moravia conducts these portions of his narrative with a kind of grave simplicity that makes of sex neither more nor less than a natural fact. Los Angeles Times Agostino is the case-study of an Oedipal conflict which manifests itself rather late by classical Freudian standards, but offers Moravia, in line with the whole tradition of the novel of adolescence in Europe, a richer, more complex subject matter to make use of than would otherwise be the case. The Southern Review Possibly the most stylistically brilliant of all Moravia's novels. Ian Thompson, London Magazine In the sober narrative of Agostino Moravia again dissected a mother-son relationship as the young protagonist of the novella made the joint discovery of sexuality (while his young, beautiful, sensuous mother became involved with a lover) and of class distinction, as the neglected boy took up with a band of working-class youth, whose sexual knowledge was far more advanced than his own. Their contempt for his innocence and their envy of his family's wealth run through the story in a typically Moravian juxtaposition. William Weaver, The New York Review of Books [T]he Augustus Caesar of postwar Italian writers. The Washington Post What continues to haunt us is the nostalgia and melancholy of the novelette, Agostino, and even earlier short stories like 'A Sick Boy's Winter.' In these, we hear the authentic, the inward Moravian voice, which speaks always in the plaintive tones of a sickly, mother-obsessed bourgeois boy. If we love rather than respect [Moravia], it is for the sake of that boy, who remains alive some place deep within the successful author-despite his pathetic boasts of potency and his even more pathetic ironies at his own expense. One imagines that little Alberto Pincherle, not yet rebaptized 'Moravia,' staring forever through the iron grille which separated his family from the street, and trying to imagine what life can really be like for all those inscrutable Poor People going about their business Out There. Leslie Fielder, The New York Times With this book one can afford to be blunt; it is, quite simply, beautiful... Mark Shorer, The New York Times The carnality that animates Agostino is naked and unashamed. But the reader who stays to its end will see that it is love with dross burned clean away. William Du Bois, The New York Times An expert study of an adolescent boy and the anguished processes by which he accepts the fact that his mother is, primarily, a woman. Vogue [Moravia's] most valuable resource has been an incomparable instinct for the life, or what passes for the life, of his time, and in particular for its pathological manifestations. John Richardson, New Statesman

Author Bio

ALBERTO MORAVIA (1907-1990) the child of a wealthy family, was raised at home because of illness. He published his first novel, The Time of Indifference, at the age of twenty-three. Banned from publishing under Mussolini, he emerged after World War II as one of the most admired and influential of twentieth-century Italian writers. In addition to Agostino, New York Review Classics publishes Moravia's novels Boredom and Contempt. MICHAEL F. MOORE is the chair of the PEN/Heim translation fund. His translations from the Italian include, most recently, Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi, The Drowned and The Saved by Primo Levi, and Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi. He is currently working on a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.