Agostino (New York Review Books Classics)

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.

...psychologically brilliant...Only Moravia could have written such a nasty and perfect ‘beach read.

...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. 

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.

Moravia writes with spare attention; the reader becomes enraptured in this sensual world just as Agostino himself begins to take notice of it

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.

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.

Possibly the most stylistically brilliant of all Moravia’s novels.

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. 

[T]he Augustus Caesar of postwar Italian writers.

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.