Evanston: THE WOMAN OF ROME; wind
Evanston: THE WOMAN OF ROME; wind
‘Whore’ is a harsh word, but it is one that Adriana, the first person narrator of Alberto Moravia’s excellent novel, THE WOMAN OF ROME, matter-of-factly applies to herself.
I came across the novel in a GUARDIAN list of the ‘Ten Best Novels Set In Rome.’ I had already read some of them, including I, CLAUDIUS; wasn’t interested in others; and decided to try THE WOMAN OF ROME because Moravia is an author whose name I know, but had not read.
I have seen reviews that say the novel is about the decadence of Fascist society. I don’t think it is at all. Although one of the characters is a high police official and another a student dabbler at protesting the state, it is a novel not of politics, but people. Alberto Moravia was born in Rome in 1909. Much of the novel takes place in 1935. He was simply writing of the society he knew.
“At sixteen years of age, I was a real beauty.” So Adriana begins her story. She is not bragging, simply describing a fact. A voluptuous girl--think young Sophia Loren, whose most famous role came in a film based on another Moravia novel, TWO WOMEN--not skinny as she says was then the fashion. She catches men’s eyes and turns their heads in passing, without trying or even caring.
She lives with her widowed and embittered mother, who ekes out a meager existence sewing shirts in their two room apartment in a poor section of the city, until in her teens she begins to model for painters. Against expectation, the artists do not seduce her. That is finally done, with her full cooperation, by Gino, a chauffeur.
Illusions of marrying Gino and having a family end; and three other men become more important in her life: Astarita, the police official who loves her, but whom she does not love; Giacomo, the student would-be revolutionary, whom she loves, but who does not love her; and Sonzogno, a brutal murderer, with whom she feels an unexpected affinity, and who comes to believe that she has turned him in to the police.
One of the pleasures of reading a fine writer is his use of language, which can be lost in translation. It was not in the Steerford Press Edition I read, with a translation by Lydia Holland updated by Tami Calliope.
A WOMAN OF ROME is informed with the author’s sympathy for Adriana, who sometimes thinks it would have been better had she never been born, an attitude perhaps not inappropriate to the first half of last century, when mankind staged one of its more successful attempts at creating hell on Earth. Yet the novel ends with possible hope.
As soon as I finished A WOMAN OF ROME I bought another of Alberto Moravia’s novels.
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Sailing Anarchy has a link to a video capturing a 231 mph wind gust hitting a small harbor in Iceland.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011