Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception ...
Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society.
Published in 1960 and 1954, respectively, these both tell the story of two men obsessed with love or the lack of it. Boredom offers Dino, an artist son of affluent parents who loses interest in his art and then himself until falling for a young model. He will do anything to possess her, even if it destroys him. Contempt's Molteni becomes stricken with the notion that his wife despises him and attempts to discern why. His life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as by the time he is done badgering her to discover the reasons for these imagined ill feelings, she truly does hate him. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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 twentieth-century Italian writers.
Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan. His latest book is Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing. A new novel, The Server, will be published in 2012.
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