Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle, was one of the leading Italian novelists of the twentieth century whose novels explore matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism. He was also a journalist, playwright, essayist and film critic. Moravia was an atheist, his writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie, underpinned by high social and cultural awareness. Moravia believed that writers must, if they were to represent reality, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude, but also that, ultimately, "A writer survives in spite of his beliefs".
Nuovi Racconti Romani = More Roman Tales, Alberto Moravia
31 stories, all told in the first person by people of the Roman working classes.
Below is a list of the names of the short stories that comprise the Racconti Romani.
Fanatico (The Fanatic) Arrivederci Pioggia di maggio (Rain in May) Non approfondire (Don't Delve Too Deeply . . .) La bella serata Scherzi del caldo (Hot Weather Jokes) La controfigura Il pagliaccio (The Clown) Il biglietto falso Il camionista (The Lorry-Driver) Il pensatore Scorfani Il mediatore (The Go-Between) Il pupo (The Baby) Il delitto perfetto (The Perfect Crime) Il picche nicche La voglia di vino Prepotente per forza Sciupone La giornata nera I gioielli (Jewellery) Tab¨´ (Taboo) Io non dico di no (I Don't say no . . .) L'inconsciente Il provino Il pignolo La ciociara (The Girl from Ciociaria) Impataccato Scherzi di ferragosto Il terrore di Roma (The Terror of Rome) L'amicizia (Friendship) La rovina dell'umanit¨¤ (The Ruin of Humanity) Perdipiede Vecchio stupido (Silly Old Fool) Caterina La parola mamma Gli occhiali (A Pair of Spectacles) Il cane cinese Mario (Mario) Gli amici senza soldi Bu bu bu Ladri in chiesa Precisamente a te Faccia di mascalzone Un uomo sfortunato Tirato a sorte Pigliati un brodo La vita in campagna Le sue giornate La gita La rivincita di Tarzan Romolo e Remo (Romulus and Remus) Faccia da norcino L'appetito (Appetite) L'infermiera (The Nurse) Il tesoro (The Treasure) La concorrenza Bassetto Il guardiano (The Caretaker) Il naso (The Nose) Il godipoco
Alberto Moravia was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Thank you, Wikipedia, for providing that handy summary. The entry on this author continues by saying that Moravia has a "factual, cold, precise style"... uh, you got that one quite wrong, my good friend. The style displayed in this book is breezy, chatty, casual. Stories are told by very human and often relatable voices, despite the multiplicity of perspectives on display. Those perspectives come from lower and working class youth, mainly boys, predators and prey and often both. The book is deceptively fun and easy going down, specifically due to its semi-comic and rather bright tone, despite the many degradations and predations on display. It is that merry tone that I blame for encouraging me to read over 100 pages of this well-written but mainly nihilistic bullshit.
I cannot stand misery porn! Especially when written by such a condescending author. My buddy Wikipedia also notes that the author came from a wealthy, middle-class family, and oh boy that shows up in spades. This is the kind of book that looks at all human beings from a certain class as bugs living in a gutter. No joy, no love, certainly no satisfaction, life is all a big nothing, nada, a void that is looked into and that looks back, laughing at your so-called dreams. It is intended to illustrate something "important" about the proletariat and about the itinerant but all it illustrates is Moravia's complete inability to recognize that happiness and kindness can exist in even the most diminished of lives and his refusal to illustrate that such human lives have more dimensions than his basic two. If you are a middle-class sort who wants to study the world of human insects so that you can feel good about feeling sorry for their pathetic so-called lives, then this is your book. Enjoy!
Una ciliegia tira l'altra Questi bei racconti di Moravia si sono rivelati,per me che non amo i racconti,una bella sorpresa.E davvero,come le ciliege uno tira l'altro!Tutte storie brevi brevi,narrate in prima persona da personaggi che provengono dal sottoproletariato e dalla piccola borghesia romana,che vivono un po' tutti di espedienti e si arrangiano come possono in modi spesso poco leciti.Ma Moravia ce li descrive,fa in modo che essi ci si presentino,sempre con sincerit¨¤,coi loro pregi e i loro difetti,senza esprimere giudizi sui loro comportamenti e lasciando a noi lettori tale compito. Questo libro mi ha riportato a Pasolini,ai suoi "Ragazzi di vita",anche se in Moravia l'uso del dialetto romanesco ¨¨ molto relativo e limitato al "modo di dire",e il popolo delle borgate appare un po' pi¨´ ripulito rispetto a quello crudo e feroce descritto da Pasolini.Un consiglio?Se vi piace l'uno,provate a leggere l'altro.
To write about Alberto Moravia is especially difficult for me since for the past decade I have had a sense of him as a figure no longer interesting or even available to anyone committed to the future possibilities of the novel rather than its past achievements. Moravia is the kind of writer who belonged to the history of the novel from the moment his first book appeared; and on the Italian scene, he has always been contrasted in this regard with Cesare Pavese, who from the start represented everything still to come. Another way of saying this is that Moravia's fiction is indebted to everything represented in the Italian imagination by ¡°Europe,¡± or more specifically, France; while Pavese's work draws upon all that resonates in the Italian mind when it dreams ¡°America.¡±
For Moravia, Pavese seemed therefore a ¡°decadent¡± writer. For us, however, he appears an experimental one; and his subsequent history has verified our view rather than his fellow Italians'. Whatever his present status, Pavese lives on in the work of his followers, like Natalia Ginsberg or Italo Calvino and Giose Rimmanelli. But Moravia has no descendants except himself¡ªonly innumerable ancestors, ranging from Flaubert and Turgenev, whom he would be glad to claim, to Maupassant and D'Annunzio, whom he probably would be embarrassed to acknowledge.
Yet even if he does not beget, he survives. My God, how he survives! Simply to add up the number of words he has written during his career leaves one dazzled and begrudgingly impressed: novels, short stories, literary essays, political manifestoes, movie reviews, etc., etc. One imagines him doing a daily stint of a couple of thousand words and wearing out a typewriter every five or six years, as he grimly pursues the elusive Nobel Prize ¡ª growing older perhaps but no less vigorous and garrulous.
His would be an extraordinary feat any place; but is especially astonishing in Italy, where writers seem sometimes to do everything but write¡ªcaught between the temptations of cafe conversation and a retreat to silence whose final form is suicide. Moravia, however, has been publishing since 1929 and shows no signs of slowing down. Even in English translation his books have been appearing for 40 years, their titles generally travestied in English all the way from ¡°Le Ambizioni Sbagliate,¡± published here in 1937 as ¡°The Wheel of Fortune,¡± to his latest novel, ¡°Io e Lui,¡± renamed for obscure reasons ¡°Two.¡±
Yet even at this moment, we are more likely to think of Calvino than of Moravia if we think of the Italian novel at all. But toward the close of the forties, ¡°The Woman of Rome¡± achieved a spectacular success, and many critics were persuaded that he stood somehow at the centre of the Italian scene. Not very long after that moment, I myself decided that I would have to come to terms with him, or at least with the problem of his reputation, even though I remained deeply ambivalent about his worth as a writer. But when I discussed my project with an Italian friend, an eminent professor and critic who shall remain nameless here for fear of the evil eye, I was disconcerted by the initial response. ¡°Good,¡± said my friend and presumably Moravia's. ¡°Tear him to pieces. His wife will love it.¡± At which point, we both seemed on the verge of becoming characters in a Moravia story. And how could I go on with my project, once aware that getting close enough to deal with Moravia's novels meant running that comic risk. Yet I kept reading the fiction even after I had decided I would not write about him. Or at least I thought of myself as continuing to read it. But when recently I opened ¡°Two,¡± I became aware that I had not really read any major effort of his for nearly a decade.
Moravia has remained a half-hearted (and until the present book fundamentally genteel) pornographer because he wants to be a popular writer without ceasing to be a sophisticated city dweller. But sex, as he understands it, is too abstract to be mythological; and his venture is therefore doomed. Yet it is hard not to admire the dogged way in which he has kept trying to make his essentially abstract concerns seem actual flesh and blood. In ¡°Two,¡± however, he finally abandons even the pretence that what intrigues him is dialogue between human beings; since his scenario writer¡ªobsessed with the notion that only ¡°desublimated¡± men succeed in the world, but forever the slave of his swollen super phallus¡ªcan talk to no one who does not share his distended skin. And with him, the secret is out: what has always concerned Moravia is the dialogue within the single self between Mind and Body, Spirit and Flesh, Ego and Id, or, as he puts this time around, between a Man and his Penis. Moravia's latest novel thus seems rather more technically innovative than his earlier works, for he feels obliged to make his ¡°phallic¡± antagonist at least as articulate and witty as the failed artist who is his protagonist. But, of course, a similar device was employed in a similar way long before. Moravia invents nothing ever, only recapitulates; and here he turns out to be doing variations on the theme somewhat more ingeniously, though less pretentiously, handled some 200 years ago by Diderot in ¡°Les Bijoux Indiscrets.¡±
Alberto Moravia ¨¨ passato di moda (a differenza della moglie Elsa Morante che attraversa un periodo di gloriosa riscoperta) e mi dispiace. La letteratura difatti va soggetta alle mode, ahim¨¦, come tutto il resto. Peccato soprattutto per le sue prime e pi¨´ famose opere (in vecchiaia si era un poco rimbambito, diventando un erotomane, come capita a non pochi uomini), tra le quali i Racconti Romani. Due volumi, un centinaio abbondante di racconti; tra questi, spiccano alcuni gioielli (Addio alla borgata, Romolo e Remo, Un uomo sfortunato, Scherzi del caldo, Tutto per la famiglia, Perdipiede), altri sono invece molto semplici o addirittura mediocri, ma tutti insieme costituiscono un affresco memorabile: non so quale altro scrittore sia riuscito tanto bene a descrivere una citt¨¤ e i suoi abitanti; soprattutto tenendo conto che questi mille personaggi sono tutti proletari o delinquenti al contrario di Moravia che era un borghese molto benestante, dunque in questa umanit¨¤ ritratta non c¡¯¨¨ nulla di autobiografico e c¡¯¨¨ invece tutta la maestria del vero scrittore che sa osservare e sa mettersi nei panni dell¡¯uomo pi¨´ lontano e diverso da s¨¦ per raccontarcelo poi con autenticit¨¤, umorismo, vivacit¨¤ e saggezza insieme, e con uno stile inimitabile che non annoia mai.
Come "Racconti Romani", anche questo ¨¨ un classico obbligatorio (nel suo seguito) della narrativa italiana. Dei racconti che coinvolgono la classe proletaria di Roma del dopoguerra. La pi¨´ parte trascorsi attorno alle borgate. Un umore molto fine, col giudizio di ognuno dei racconti lasciato al lettore.Moravia riesce a trasportare il lettore in Italia in quel periodo dove l'Europa, devastata dalla guerra si stava ancora riprendendo, e dove parecchia gente viveva di espedienti. Eccellente.
Bella serie di racconti che presentano brevi ritratti romani. Ho, come sempre, apprezzato la scrittura di Moravia, anche se alla lunga molte delle situazioni e dei personaggi presentati tendono a diventare ripetitivi. Sebbene ci¨° renda a volte pesante la lettura consecutiva di molti racconti, credo che la raccolta si presti molto bene ad una lettura pi¨´ "casuale" (ad esempio aprendo il libro a caso e leggendo il primo racconto che si trova).
More Roman Tales than I need, but Less Roman Tales than I want!!! There is no decline in quality of the tales from the first volume to this- both are chock full of delicious little stories, some of the most effortlessly compelling writing in Moravia¡¯s oeuvre.
I loved to read this and the first Roman Tales before bed every night. I liked the first one better because this set was a little more depressing but still fun and weird little stories reads more like an interesting conversation. Wish there was another volume!
Stories about Romans (usually the common class in post WWII Italy) Brutally honest and funny, tragic comedies, and clever little scenarios. His character development is so fantastic that I'm beginning to think it's not fiction at all. I've never read a Moravia short story and felt let down. Bizarre tales (and some are a bit morbid or risque for the time) whether it's tale about the guy who was hired to spy on his friend's wife, or the star-crossed lovers who plan to drive over the girl's cruel aunt, or the guy who tries to have his co-worker killed only to be saved himself by a dirty street hooker. I love it.