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.
Über den Autor Alberto Moravia
![]()
Alberto Moravia, 1907 in Rom geboren, begann 1925 nach schwerer Krankheit zu schreiben. Bereits sein Erstlingsroman 'Die Gleichgültigen' (1929) fand große Beachtung. Seit 1941 von der Zensur stark behindert, erhielt er wenig später wegen seiner immer offener demonstrierten antifaschistischen Haltung Schreibverbot. Nach 1944 war Moravia politisch und literarisch eine der wichtigsten und einflussreichsten Persönlichkeiten Italiens. Seine Romane und Erzählungen weckten mehrmals das Interesse großer Filmregisseure wie Jean-Luc Godard ('Die Verachtung') und Bernardo Bertolucci ('Der große Irrtum'). Er starb 1990 in Rom.
