Agostino
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3.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moravia's novel is neither among the great Italian modernist's most famous works (The Conformist and Contempt became classic films, by Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean-Luc Godard, respectively), nor, at 100 pages, his longest. But 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. Young Agostino is on holiday on the coast with the mother he worships. But when she takes a lover, a dejected Agostino seeks acceptance in a group of wild children whose life consists of cruel games and petty crimes. The only adult in their midst is the 12-fingered boatman (and presumptive pederast) Sandro, whose advances toward Agostino call into question the innocence of the young boy's desires for his mother's attention. Determined to free himself from the new obsessions that trouble his summer days, Agostino sets his sights on an ill-conceived salvation that is, the approximation of manhood offered by a local brothel to reconcile the warring passions that have interrupted his idyll. 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.
