Alberto Moravia

The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a writer who, as Anthony Burgess once remarked, was “always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio.”

Boredom

Fredo Moreno

The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence

As I have said, her love of flowers and plants was the only poetical thing in my mother's otherwise completely prosaic life. It is true that, in her way, she loved me; and that she introduced an unbelievable passion into the management and the enlargement of our property. But, both in business matters and with me, the predominant influence was her own character, authoritative, unscrupulous, self-interested, mistrustful. Flowers and plants, on the other hand, she loved in an entirely disinterested way, with unrestrained enthusiasm and no ulterior motives.

This mechanism was not unknown to me, indeed I had always suspected its existence; but I had never seen it with such clarity as I did now—just as you can look at the window display of an airline company and see a section of an airplane engine, with all its numerous and complicated parts. It was, in fact, the mechanism of despair, which, if I returned to live with my mother, would cause me to recoil from money into a state of impotence, from impotence to boredom and from boredom to Rita or to some other degradation of a similar or parallel kind. Better to go back to the studio in Via Margutta, where despair expressed itself, at least, in the empty canvas upon which I would never paint.

Balestrieri, without realizing it, was at that time ceasing to be the Don Juan, the collector of adventures, that he had always been, and was for the first time devoting himself, or wishing to devote himself, to one woman only. The numerous girls, all more or less of the same age, were therefore nothing more than the progressive experiments in a type which, little by little, was becoming precisely defined; tentative approaches toward an ideal figure which, some day, would become flesh and blood.

Boredom quotes

Join the club