Title: Despair
Original title: Il disprezzo
Author: Alberto Moravia
Translated by: Aida Baro
Genre: Roman
Publication Date: October, 2019
Number Of Pages: 232
Price: 800 ALL
Collection: Mosaic
The one-sentence book
"Contempt" is a relentless examination of despair and self-deception in the emotional emptiness of modern consumer society.
General information about the book
The novel "Despicable" was first published in 1954 and represents one of the major stages of Alberto Moravia's journey and exploration of the world of the Italian bourgeoisie of the last century.
Ricardo Molteni is a playwright by profession, but due to the family's economic pressures he is forced to work as a screenwriter, while his wife, Emily, a former typist, is in love with owning a home. In a bourgeois Rome of the 1950s, Ricardo recounts how his wife's feelings for him change as the world of cinema, career and success comes into play. At the top, they slowly fade away until they reach that painful contempt, which seems incomprehensible to both the protagonist and the reader, but which Moravia chooses as the book's title anyway. Because it is precisely the despair, tangible in the dialogues between the couple, that will return to the character and change the roles of the protagonists, even becoming the protagonist himself, the engine from which their every action and reaction arises.
The myth of "Odyssey" and the return of Ulysses to Penelopa's home will be transformed into a subtle confrontation and analysis between citizenship and barbarism, between the norms of honor and modern man.
In 1963, the novel was screened by renowned French director Jean-Luc Godard, starring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccioli.
Critics
It is precisely in "Contempt" that Moravia's main problematic finds its most precise and complex expression, almost an encyclopedia bringing together its various themes.
Edoardo Sanguinetti
"Despicable" is a brilliant and disturbing work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities that Moravia is known for - cold expressive clarity, his fine attention to psychological complexity, his still startling openness to sex - are clearly evident in the story of this failed marriage. "Contempt" is a relentless examination of despair and self-deception in the emotional emptiness of modern consumer society.
New York Review Books Classics
Rich in essence and deep in meaning ... a rare achievement.
The New York Times
Moravia's heroes seek personal happiness, but the writer almost always leads to the abyss. [...] this is the destruction of illusions about the possibility of human happiness ... Perhaps this is more evident than ever in one of the best works of Moravia, in the novel "The Despair."
From the preface by Ruf Igorevich Chlodovsky, to the publication of the novel in the former Soviet Union in 1979.
author
Alberto Moravia is considered one of the greatest Italian writers of the 20th century. He was among others a playwright, journalist, screenwriter and film critic. He is known as the initiator of the bourgeois novel, through which, as a master of sharpness, simplicity and stylistic elegance, he has endlessly explored the themes of social alienation, highlighting the hypocrisy, materialism and moral poverty of his era. In this sense, his work leads to forms of realism rich in rational clarity, the existential crisis of the bourgeoisie that has traversed the years of fascism and the postwar period, constantly combining subjectivity with objectivity.
His novels have often been screened by well-known directors such as Bernardo Bertoluci, Jean-Luc Godard, Vittorio De Sica, Luigi Zampa, Cedric Kahn and others.
Excerpts from the book
1) Why, then, did Emilia stop loving me, why did she despise me? And most of all, why did he feel the need to despise me?
I was suddenly struck by Emilia's saying, "Because you are not a man," which had impressed me on her general and ordinary character, contrary to the sincere and sincere spirit with which she was pronounced; and I thought that maybe that expression was the key to Emilia's attitude towards me. In fact, in that expression, the distorted, ideal image that Emilia had of a man who, in her words, was a real man was hidden: precisely, according to her, the one who was not me and who could not I never was.
2) Man's greatest happiness is when he is unaware of it.
3) ... a wickedness that I do not know will happen, it causes turmoil, because above all, it hopes to the end that it is not true; but when you know that this evil is safe, on the contrary, you are immersed for some time in a downright calm.
4) - But in the poem, Penelope loves Ulysses ... even, in a way, the whole Odyssey axis revolves around Penelope's love for Ulysses.
I saw Reingold wipe my remark with a smile.
- Fidelity, Mr. Molten, not love ... Penelope is faithful to Ulysses, but we don't know how much she loves him ... and, as you know, you can sometimes be faithful and not love ... Even, in some cases, loyalty is a form of vengeance, blackmail, payback ... Loyalty, not love.
