Life of Moravia

Moravia, Alberto; Elkann, Alain

ISBN 10: 1883642507 / ISBN 13: 9781883642501

Published by Steerforth Italia (edition First Edition), 2000

About this Item

With dust jacket. The item might be beaten up but readable. May contain markings or highlighting, as well as stains, bent corners, or any other major defect, but the text is not obscured in any way.

Seller Inventory # 1883642507-7-1-29

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Life of Moravia
• Publisher: Steerforth Italia (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1883642507
• ISBN 13: 9781883642501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fair
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

THE EXTRAORDINARY self-posession of Alberto Moravia can be traced to the many months he endured as a child and as a young man, confined to his bed, entirely alone, with nothing but books and his imagination to carry him through a long struggle against tuberculosis of the bone. He had no friends, no social life, no years at a university to connect him to the world. The result was a kind of unblinking gaze and acceptance of life which made him first one of the great novelists of the age, and finally one of the great memoirists.

The Time of Indifference, his first novel (published this season by Steerforth), begun when he was only eighteen and published three years later, in 1929, changed the Italian literary landscape forever. That early fame never died and later novels - The Woman of Rome, The Conformist - only enhanced his reputation.

Moravia put his life into his books but only now, with this unusual autobiography in the form of an interview with his friend, the writer Alain Elkann, is it possible to understand the literary use he made of the bourgeois world of his childhood in Rome, of his encounter with Fascism under Mussolini, of his months in hiding from the Germans in the mountains south of Rome, and of his marriages to two of the leading writers of his time - Elsa Morante and Dacia Maraini.

About the Author

WILLIAM WEAVER, the translator of Life of Moravia, knew the writer well and says the book captures the sound and tone of his conversation - amused, full of life and incident, and above all honest about himself, Italy, and the world. This book was Moravia's last - the first copies came from the press on the day he died in 1990. It has never previously appeared in English.