Scan barcode
A review by vaticerratic
Boredom by Alberto Moravia
Funny psycho-narrative study of a character who's got himself all wrong. Narrator Dino has been born into wealth, but keeps insisting that he can't afford things simply to avoid the strings attached when he asks his mother for money (meanwhile, she insists, quite rightly, that you don't really stop being a wealthy heir so easily, merely by announcing that you're not).
The story includes many meditations on boredom, but Dino uses the word idiosyncratically, to describe his condition of disconnection from or non-relation to the world. But is he really so uninvested? He gets caught in a cycle, that continues to the end of the book, of insisting that he has the upper hand in his relationship with his young lover Cecilia, only to once again debase himself in his maniacal desire to possess and control her. His alienation isn't so much from the world or the people in it as from himself, whom he barely seems to know.
By the 80% mark of the book, Dino's made so many claims about himself that don't add up that I hardly trust anything he says. At the same time, I felt that I didn't know all the things I didn't know. The book masterfully tortured me with a desire it refused to sate to pinpoint exactly how much his account distorted things.
My favorite aspect of the novel was its absurdism, especially in the long bizarre interrogations to which the hectoring Dino subjects both his mother and Cecilia. Unfortunately the conversations with Cecilia are the point where the mediocre 1963 film adaptation (which our book club also watched) is the most disappointing. In the film, the long interviews with Cecilia are truncated and Cecilia herself is rendered less Bartleby-esque. The movie does a better job with Dino's exchanges with his mother, played by Bette Davis, who is universally seen as the film's saving grace.
The other thing I liked about the book was Moravia's complicated play with vicariousness: Dino thinking about Cecilia with other men, Cecilia getting pleasure from giving pleasure, Dino's mother's will to control him, etc. It's very sophisticated and gets at something profound about desire's slippery propensity for sliding along social networks.
The story includes many meditations on boredom, but Dino uses the word idiosyncratically, to describe his condition of disconnection from or non-relation to the world. But is he really so uninvested? He gets caught in a cycle, that continues to the end of the book, of insisting that he has the upper hand in his relationship with his young lover Cecilia, only to once again debase himself in his maniacal desire to possess and control her. His alienation isn't so much from the world or the people in it as from himself, whom he barely seems to know.
By the 80% mark of the book, Dino's made so many claims about himself that don't add up that I hardly trust anything he says. At the same time, I felt that I didn't know all the things I didn't know. The book masterfully tortured me with a desire it refused to sate to pinpoint exactly how much his account distorted things.
My favorite aspect of the novel was its absurdism, especially in the long bizarre interrogations to which the hectoring Dino subjects both his mother and Cecilia. Unfortunately the conversations with Cecilia are the point where the mediocre 1963 film adaptation (which our book club also watched) is the most disappointing. In the film, the long interviews with Cecilia are truncated and Cecilia herself is rendered less Bartleby-esque. The movie does a better job with Dino's exchanges with his mother, played by Bette Davis, who is universally seen as the film's saving grace.
The other thing I liked about the book was Moravia's complicated play with vicariousness: Dino thinking about Cecilia with other men, Cecilia getting pleasure from giving pleasure, Dino's mother's will to control him, etc. It's very sophisticated and gets at something profound about desire's slippery propensity for sliding along social networks.