None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Thirteen-year-old Agostino spends the opening weeks of a Tuscan seaside summer in a state of pure filial euphoria, rowing his beautiful widowed mother across the glassy morning sea on a flat-bottomed pattino, feeling watched, envied, and magnificent. He lights her cigarettes with tremulous care. He rows while she bares her back to the sun. He adores her with the total, theatrical, slightly unhinged devotion of a loving boy.
Then a tanned young boatman appears on the beach, extends a hand, and the mother accepts the invitation with an ease that feels to Agostino like betrayal, like an eviction. She boards the stranger's boat with the same warm spontaneity she used to reserve for her son. Agostino, suddenly demoted from adored companion to surplus luggage, is dragged along on these rides, seated at the oars with his back turned, listening to laughter he cannot decode, while her wet bathing suit presses against his cheek in a way he finds obscurely unbearable.
His exile from paradise deposits him, through a series of beach accidents and wounded pride, among a rough gang of working-class boys at Vespucci beach, led by Saro, a six-fingered lifeguard of ambiguous appetites, and dominated by Tortima, a bully of cheerful brutality.
These boys know things. They say things. They say them loudly, about women, about bodies, about what men and women do. The gang's other luminary is Berto, a blond Apollonian boy whom Agostino admires with an intensity that puzzles him.
The group includes Homs, a Black boy the others call "the Moor," who serves as the gang's scapegoat and occasional Greek chorus. Together they swim, steal from orchards, sail, fight, humiliate Agostino for his accent and his clean clothes, and introduce him, episode by episode, to the existence of a world his mother's house has kept sealed.
The difficulty is that every scrap of knowledge Agostino acquires about desire and its mechanics transforms his mother further, in his eyes, from a figure of serene maternal majesty into something murkier and more troubling, a woman. He spies on her through a half-open door. He catalogues her body with what he calls scientific curiosity and what Moravia calls something else entirely. He tries to catch her in the act of being compromised by the young boatman, scrutinizing her face and neck for evidence that something has happened on the water. He wills himself to feel contempt. He wills himself to feel nothing. He tells himself, like a mantra, "She's only a woman."
The summer is still going. He has, by his own reckoning, the whole rest of the season to become a man...
Alberto Moravia wrote Agostino in one month in 1942 on the island of Capri. The Fascist censors rejected it. A novel about a thirteen-year-old boy discovering that his mother is a sexual creature was, apparently, too much for a regime that preferred its Italians either heroic or decorative.
Moravia (born Alberto Pincherle in Rome in 1907) had already scandalized the literary establishment with Gli indifferenti at age twenty-one, a novel so cool and pitiless that critics called his prose gray and neutral. He spent the war years hiding in the mountains with his wife, the writer Elsa Morante. He survived. The censors did not.
Innocence is a convenience, and growing up consists largely of losing the right to pretend otherwise. Agostino wants to sever what Moravia calls "the thread of troubled sensuality" binding him to his mother, but the thread is not external. The knowledge he acquires from the gang coarsens him. Each revelation doubles his confusion. He ends the summer older but unresolved.
The particular anguish of discovering that the people we have idealized are bodily, desiring, and indifferent to our worship is permanently relevant. The way Moravia tells it, though, is, as the kids say, suss.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Thirteen-year-old Agostino spends the opening weeks of a Tuscan seaside summer in a state of pure filial euphoria, rowing his beautiful widowed mother across the glassy morning sea on a flat-bottomed pattino, feeling watched, envied, and magnificent. He lights her cigarettes with tremulous care. He rows while she bares her back to the sun. He adores her with the total, theatrical, slightly unhinged devotion of a loving boy.
Then a tanned young boatman appears on the beach, extends a hand, and the mother accepts the invitation with an ease that feels to Agostino like betrayal, like an eviction. She boards the stranger's boat with the same warm spontaneity she used to reserve for her son. Agostino, suddenly demoted from adored companion to surplus luggage, is dragged along on these rides, seated at the oars with his back turned, listening to laughter he cannot decode, while her wet bathing suit presses against his cheek in a way he finds obscurely unbearable.
His exile from paradise deposits him, through a series of beach accidents and wounded pride, among a rough gang of working-class boys at Vespucci beach, led by Saro, a six-fingered lifeguard of ambiguous appetites, and dominated by Tortima, a bully of cheerful brutality.
These boys know things. They say things. They say them loudly, about women, about bodies, about what men and women do. The gang's other luminary is Berto, a blond Apollonian boy whom Agostino admires with an intensity that puzzles him.
The group includes Homs, a Black boy the others call "the Moor," who serves as the gang's scapegoat and occasional Greek chorus. Together they swim, steal from orchards, sail, fight, humiliate Agostino for his accent and his clean clothes, and introduce him, episode by episode, to the existence of a world his mother's house has kept sealed.
The difficulty is that every scrap of knowledge Agostino acquires about desire and its mechanics transforms his mother further, in his eyes, from a figure of serene maternal majesty into something murkier and more troubling, a woman. He spies on her through a half-open door. He catalogues her body with what he calls scientific curiosity and what Moravia calls something else entirely. He tries to catch her in the act of being compromised by the young boatman, scrutinizing her face and neck for evidence that something has happened on the water. He wills himself to feel contempt. He wills himself to feel nothing. He tells himself, like a mantra, "She's only a woman."
The summer is still going. He has, by his own reckoning, the whole rest of the season to become a man...
Alberto Moravia wrote Agostino in one month in 1942 on the island of Capri. The Fascist censors rejected it. A novel about a thirteen-year-old boy discovering that his mother is a sexual creature was, apparently, too much for a regime that preferred its Italians either heroic or decorative.
Moravia (born Alberto Pincherle in Rome in 1907) had already scandalized the literary establishment with Gli indifferenti at age twenty-one, a novel so cool and pitiless that critics called his prose gray and neutral. He spent the war years hiding in the mountains with his wife, the writer Elsa Morante. He survived. The censors did not.
Innocence is a convenience, and growing up consists largely of losing the right to pretend otherwise. Agostino wants to sever what Moravia calls "the thread of troubled sensuality" binding him to his mother, but the thread is not external. The knowledge he acquires from the gang coarsens him. Each revelation doubles his confusion. He ends the summer older but unresolved.
The particular anguish of discovering that the people we have idealized are bodily, desiring, and indifferent to our worship is permanently relevant. The way Moravia tells it, though, is, as the kids say, suss.
❤️ 🇮🇱