Alberto Moravia (November 28, 1907 – September 26, 1990), born Alberto Pincherle, was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism.

He is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti (published in 1929), and for the anti-fascist novel Il Conformista (The Conformist), the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci. Other novels of his translated to the cinema are Agostino, filmed with the same title by Mauro Bolognini in 1962; Il Disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon or Contempt), filmed by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963); La Noia (Boredom), filmed with that title by Damiano Damiani in 1963 and released in the US as The Empty Canvas in 1964; and La Ciociara, filmed by Vittorio de Sica as Two Women (1960). Cedric Kahn's L'Ennui (1998) is another version of La Noia. He was an atheist.

He once remarked that the most important facts of his life had been his illness, a tubercular infection of the bones that confined him to a bed for five years, and Fascism, because they both caused him to suffer and do things he otherwise would not have done. "It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will." His writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie, and was rooted in the tradition of nineteenth-century narrative, underpinned by high social and cultural awareness. In his world, where inherited social, religious and moral beliefs are no longer acceptable, he considered sex and money the only basic criteria for judging social and human reality. Moravia believed that writers must, if they were to be successful in representing reality, "assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude" but also that, ultimately, – "A writer survives in spite of his beliefs."

Between 1959 and 1962 Moravia was President of the worldwide association of writers, PEN International.

Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life, and the substantial incapability of people finding happiness in traditional ways such as love and marriage are the regnant themes in the works of Alberto Moravia. Usually, these conditions are pathologically typical of middle-class life; marriage, in particular, is the target of works such as Disobedience and L'amore coniugale ("Conjugal Love") (1949). Alienation is the theme in works such as Il disprezzo ("Contempt" or "A Ghost at Noon") (1954) and La noia ("The Empty Canvas") from the 1950s, despite observation from a rational-realistic perspective. Political themes are often present: an example is La Romana ("The Woman of Rome") (1947), the story of a prostitute entangled with the Fascist regime and with a network of conspirators. The extreme sexual realism in La noia ("The Empty Canvas") (1960) introduced the psychologically experimental works of the 1970s.

Moravia's writing style was highly regarded for being extremely stark and unadorned, characterised by very elementary, common words within an elaborate syntax. A complex mood is established by mixing a proposition constituting the description of a single psychological observation mixed with another such proposition. In the later novels, the inner monologue is prominent.


The torrent contains following books in ePUB format:

* Contempt, 1954

* The Conjugal Love, 1949

* The Empty Canvas or Boredom, 1960



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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Moravia
 
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5093/the-art-of-fiction-no-6-alberto-moravia
 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/08/alberto-moravia-hero-john-burnside
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/books/review/reading-alberto-moravia-in-silvio-berlusconis-italy.html?_r=0
 
http://critique-magazine.com/article/moravia.html