Two Adolescents: The Stories of Agostino & Luca

by Alberto Moravia

Two novels by Alberto Moravia display his gifts as a teller of stories sharp with characterization and deep understanding.Agostino is the story of a sensitive, cloistered boy who, beyond all sense of proportion, loves and idolizes his youthful widowed mother. The shock of finding he is not the center of his mother's universe is more than Agostino can stand. In an instinctive fumbling effort to gain self-respect and values, Agostino joins a gang of older boys who derisively and callously supply him with a quick and drastic sexual education. Agostino finds he has won knowledge without wisdom; and in the words of Moravia. "He has lost his first estate without having succeeded in winning another."

Luca is more sophisticated, knowing and introspective. When his active mind questions the conventions and routine of everyday life he comes gradually to the conclusion that life is a monstrous conspiracy -- a plot to make one conform at the expense of one's soul. His answer is a complete negation of the pattern of living -- an austere and adolescent reaction that leads him, unwittingly to the brink of death itself, and from which only the purge of violent illness and an unexpected romance save him, mentally and physically, and show him the way to maturity.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Italian Literature, Italy, Novella

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle, was one of the leading Italian novelists of the twentieth century whose novels explore matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism. He was also a journalist, playwright, essayist and film critic.
Moravia was an atheist, his writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie, underpinned by high social and cultural awareness. Moravia believed that writers must, if they were to represent 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".

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alberto was a PEN luminary and turns up in
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 with Angus Wilson.

"Agostino" is a fabulous little story: young angsty teenager, confused and by the end determined to have sex with something. "Disobedience" was less entertaining, although I loved Luca for going nuts when his sophisticated buffet car experience was cancelled and he's presented with a packed lunch. I did something very similar on my recent holiday in America.


"And speaking slowly and helping himself out with gestures which were significant without being coarse, [Sandro] explained to Agostino what he now felt he had always known but had somehow forgotten, as in a deep sleep. Sandro's explanation was followed by other less sober ones. Some of the boys made vulgar gestures with their hands, others dinned into Agostino's ears coarse words which he had never heard before; two of them said: 'We'll show him what they do,' and gave a demonstration on the hot sand, jerking and writhing in each other's arms. ... 'Do you understand now?' asked Saro, directly the din had died down. Agsotino nodded."

[Amandine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review: italiano / français

Letto in italiano per il mio corso di letteratura italiana (Ottocento en Novecento): une lettura interessante, ma un pò troppo "freudica" per me. L'idea della scoperta della sessualità di maniera brutale mi sembra buona, ma non mi piace che questa sessualità sia tornata verso la mamma. La storia non mi piace tanto dunque, ma la scrittura sì! Lo stilo di Moravia è piacevole a leggere e molto bello.

Lu en italien pour mon cours de littérature italienne (19e et 20e siècle): une lecture intéressante, mais un peu trop freudienne à mon goût. L'idée de la découverte de la sexualité de manière assez brutale me semble bonne, mais le fait que cette sexualité soit tournée vers la mère ne me plaît pas. L'histoire ne me plaît donc pas tellement, mais l'écriture si! Le style de Moravia est agréable à lire et très beau.

[Irene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good, not great, but still good. Son dos cuentos, el primero trata sobre un niño burgués que sale de su burbuja de algodones y se empieza a llevar con gente de clase más baja, como que empieza a descubrir la "verdad" y hostilidad del mundo.

El segundo me gustó más, el cuento es un poco sin más pero sí trata temas interesantes como la posición que tomamos en el mundo, siguiendo unas reglas no escritas, muchas veces por inercia - "El mundo lo quería buen hijo, buen alumno, buen chico, buen amigo; pero a él no le gustaba el mundo ni esos papeles que pretendían imponerle y debía desobedecer" - . También indaga mucho en el tema de la propiedad, tanto desde un punto de vista material - en el aprecio que tenemos a las cosas, aunque ya no nos gusten o no las usemos, a las que nos une un "lazo de celos y miedo", movidos por el ansia de poseer - como desde una perspectiva relacional, de la manera en que nos relacionamos con otros - "Ni siquiera era capaz de querer que la institutriz existiese por sí misma: debía morir y vivir para él. También esto era vivir, y así entendían la vida los padres, los profesores y todos"

No pudo dejar de pensar, esto era vivir, continuar viviendo, hacer con pasión y tenacidad cosas absurdas e insensatas para las que era imposible encontrar una justificación

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Moravia is an important 20th C Italian author. Someone that I’ve been intending to read since I was first introduced to modern Italian literature as an undergraduate (Italo Svevo, Cesare Pavese, Giuseppi Lampedusa, Ignazio Silone). This old Signet edition came from my father-in-law when he was vacating his university office and culling his book collection.

“Agostino”

Although the plot line moves from innocence to experience for the adolescent protagonist, Agostino, his story is also circular, beginning and ending in Oedipal frustration. The story takes place at seaside resort, where Agostino and his mother are among the wealthy patrons vacationing there. Agostino is 13 years old, and he is very attached to his mother. The father is dead, so there is little to disturb the Oedipal bond. They spend much time on the beach, and Agostino is very aware of his mother’s beauty and sensuality, with which he is fascinated, although he doesn’t know why. He is jealous when other men pay attention to his mother, but she ignores them (relief!) until she is attracted to one of them, and they start seeing one another (frustration!). Within the edenic Oedipal bubble, Agostino is happy and has limited agency: he acts to please his mother, and thus he is pleased himself. Whatever adolescent desires there might be, they are still latent, and Agostino is still innocent.

With the presence of his mother’s love interest, Agostino suppresses his disapproval until he no longer can and makes a barbed comment, after which his mother slaps him. The slap breaks the Oedipal bubble, and Agostino escapes into adolescence. He finds a group of rough teenagers, sons of the resort’s employees, to hang out with. They don’t respect Agostino or his family’s wealth, and they insult, bait, and verbally abuse him. Agostino is ashamed and humiliated again and again, but he keeps coming back, because the boys offer him the knowledge of sexuality and experience that he is learning to crave. In the wilder, marginal parts of the beach community, the boys’ behavior is explicitly heteronormative and homosocial, which initially confuses Agostino because coming from an Oedipal bubble he doesn’t understand what all this male id-driven behavior means, but then that behavior helps him make sense of his own emerging sexuality and understand his attraction to his mother from a place outside the Oedipal bubble. He tries to understand his mother as simply a beautiful woman and is appalled by his attraction to her and the intimacy of their relationship. Making a bid for independence, Agostino spends less time at the main resort, and he doesn’t tell his mother where he goes or about his new group of friends.

Having activated Agostino’s adolescent development, Moravia reins him in. As part of their adventuring, the boys find their way to a plaza of old mansions, which are now being used as bordellos. After one of the boys explains to Agostino the nature of prostitution, Agostino wants to have sex with a prostitute, and he goes home to find the money and devise a plan to sneak back without his mother finding out. This moment could be the next step in breaking with his mother, but it isn’t. Although Agostino devises a plan, he asks his mother if he can use his own money “to buy a book,” and when he finds that he doesn’t have enough he asks his mother for the money, which she willingly gives, directing him to get it from her purse, which is on the bed. Agostino knows where his mother keeps her money. Why doesn’t he just illicitly take what he needs? Why does he ask her permission to use his own money? Back in the Oedipal bubble, Agostino is the obedient child again rather than the burgeoning adolescent.

Still, Agostino sneaks out and goes to one of the old mansions with one of the boys who had agreed to show him the ropes. Once there, the other boy gets in, but the madame won’t let Agostino in because he is too young and tells him to go home. Two of the other customers also tell him to go home. Humiliated and ashamed again, but before returning to the Oedipal bubble, Agostino sneaks around the outside of the mansion until he stops at a window where he sees a woman in a revealing, tight fitting dress. He is reduced to a voyeur, and a sudden noise sends him skittering back home, where, because a friend of the mother is visiting and spending the night in Agostino’s room, Agostino is sleeping in his mother’s room on a cot. As his mother prepares for bed, he notices that her negligee is as revealing as the dress of the woman he saw through the window of the bordello. He is so frustrated that he asks her to stop treating him like a child, and she, completely unaware of all that her son has been going through, breezily agrees to treat him like a man. Knowing more than he did at the beginning of the story, Agostino understands that his development has been stymied and that manhood is still far away. The Oedipal bubble closes again, but now Agostino knows just how little agency he has. The tantalizing, voyeuristic 1950s cover of the book and all that it suggests is undone by the ending of the story.

“Luca”

A story with a great deal more drama than Agostino’s. Luca’s adolescent development is far more anguished and dangerous–and interesting–because he becomes self-destructive.

Before adolescence, Luca is a good kid: good son, good student, obedient, all on board with being properly socialized. At the beginning of the story, though, Luca’s life is marked by rage and illness. Too much in the day to day world makes him angry, but he doesn’t express that anger. He remains emotionally flat, without affect, but inside he rages. Or in the instance of a train journey with his parents returning home from vacation, he retreats to the bathroom in the coach car and silently screams in the mirror. His parents have no idea what he is going through, and the only sign of his rage manifests through illness (nausea, chills, body aches). When they get off the train and head home–back to his ordinary life of family and school–Luca feels so nauseous that he vomits on the engine, as if to punish it for bringing him back home. This kid suffers from Sartre’s nausea: the world is an existential vacuum from which he can neither create nor derive meaning. Where he once found conforming to the expectations of others (family, society, teachers, students, friends) fulfilling, he now finds it all revolting, but he does not reveal that revulsion except indirectly by his illnesses, sleeping too much, and a bored and distracted affect. Others cannot read him, and he passes through the world pretty invisibly with only a few signs of his unhappiness (poor grades, declining to eat).

As Luca looks at the world as meaningless, he makes the conscious decision to sever connections, not in a way that would cause concerning attention or much alter the external form of his bland obedience to his every day habits and behaviors, but he empties out those habits and behaviors: he goes to school but does not listen; he begins to do his homework but falls asleep. He sleepwalks through his life while finding it all meaningless, and then he suffers from attacks of suppressed rage and illness. As he decides to sever more connections, Luca’s existential spiral becomes more noticeable: he gives away his stamp collection; he sells his books and toys, and rather than buying something else with the proceeds he buries the money instead; he barely eats, which his parents do notice. Without being suicidal–he does not want to take his own life–Luca is ceasing to exist. He is stripping away all of his different beings (self, family, school, society).

Sex interrupts this slow fade. While his aunt recovers from a serious illness and needs rest, her children and their governess stay with Luca’s family. Luca finds himself attracted to the governess, and the governess returns the attraction. There is some tentative and pleasing intimacy, and the governess invites him to meet her at her place. Luca is interested but also disgusted by the ordinariness of his desire and the ties it creates, so he delays doing anything. When he decides to follow through, he discovers that the governess has unfortunately become gravely ill and after a few days dies. They do not have sex. He does not lose his virginity, but he instead contemplates the bond between desire and death, discovering once again the meaningless of existence, thus deepening his existential crisis. Adolescent desire, instead of spurring Luca back into life, pushes him toward self-destruction. He can no longer hide his dis-ease behind a veneer of obedience. One day in class, he remains standing when the professor has told everyone to sit down, and when the professor asks what he wants Luca says “Nothing”--giving actual voice to what he is feeling. The professor then has Luca read a passage from the Purgatorio, and Luca identifies so strongly with the character Buonconte and his death that he has an epiphany about his own desire for death, and he stops reading. The class is disturbed by Luca’s behavior, and the professor sends him home; on the way, Luca is caught in a downpour, does nothing to protect himself, and ends up sick for months, in a perpetual delirium, caught in a limbo between life and death. Throughout the story, Luca is caught between, and he is once again caught between here.

And once again, Moravia intervenes with sex, this time from the nurse–a woman who was once of high standing but has fallen on hard times–hired by Luca’s still clueless parents to tend their son. Out of his delirium, Luca is not initially attracted to the much older woman, but in the intimacy of her ministrations attraction develops. This time, though, Moravia does not kill off the love interest. Instead, the night before her final day as his nurse, they have consensual sex, which functions as therapy for Luca. He does not fall in love, but the sex refocuses him and renews his ties to life. Although still convalescing at the end, thoughts of death have faded for Luca. At the beginning, Luca is on a train, and he feels so abject he vomits. At the end, Luca is on a train on the way to a mountain sanitarium; the train travels through a long tunnel (darkness), comes out into the light(rebirth!), and Luca feels much better. The symbolism is a little heavy handed. The story is at its best when Moravia explores Luca’s existential disgust; the story loses credibility when Moravia uses therapeutic sex as resolution for Luca’s self-destructive angst.

What is most interesting and alarming about these stories is the uncritical portrayal of the bourgeoisie's use of the lower classes to facilitate bourgeois males’ sexual awakening. Caught in his wealthy mother’s Oedipal bubble, Agostino is extraordinarily naïve and needs the working class boys and a peep through a window of a bordello to clue him in on his own sexuality. Luca needs the governess and the nurse, two women employed to serve the needs of the family, to get him over his existential crisis. Agostino’s mother and Luca’s parents remain blithely unaware of their sons’ sexual development, but those down the social scale in both stories are acutely aware of it. Moravia is uncritical of this sexual economy and the exploitation that fuels it.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for Italian Lit Month at Winston’s Dad, just scraping in on the second-last day of the month!

As you can see from my battered 1960 Penguin edition of Two Adolescents this book has been around for quite a while. The price on the front cover is four shillings, but I picked it up in an Op Shop for 20c over a decade ago. There’s no introduction, only a profile of Alberto Moravia on the back cover, and a blurb for the two short stories Agostino and Disobedience on the inside cover. (The blurb calls them novels but at 83 and 113 pages respectively, they barely qualify as novellas).
Wikipedia amplifies the profile supplied by Penguin. Moravia (1907-1990) was born into a middle class professional family in Rome, but suffered ill health from the time he was nine years old. Confined to bed with TB of the bone, he became a bookish child, learning French and German and reading everything from Boccaccio to Dostoevsky; James Joyce to Shakespeare; and Molière, Gogol and Mallarmé. After he left the sanatorium aged 18, he wrote his first novel Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference), which was published in 1929. Wikipedia describes this novel as typical of Moravia’s themes: a realistic analysis of the moral decadence of a middle-class mother and two of her children.
He became a foreign correspondent but fell foul of the authorities under fascism and his books were banned. It was not until Rome was liberated in 1944 that he was able to resume writing under his own name. He became popular and prolific, and he won various awards and was considered a contender for the Nobel Prize.
Wikipedia tells me that:

Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life and the inability of people to find 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…(/blockquote>
This certainly seems to be true of Agostino (banned in 1941). Agostino is a naïve middle-class 13-year old boy on holiday with his mother at a coastal resort. (It’s not named, but it’s probably Capri because that’s where he was when he wrote the story). He adores his mother, who is a tall, beautiful woman, and when they go boating together he feels a sense of pride each time he set out with her.
To read the rest of my review please visit
https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/29/a...
I will come back here and post my review of the second title some time over the next week...
... And here it is: https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/31/d...

[Peter Allum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in Italian as two novellas, but combined in a single US edition. Combined 4-star rating—5 stars for Agostino, 3 stars for Luca.

Agostino:

The protagonist, a sensitive 13-year old, spends the summer at the beach with his adored, wealthy, beautiful young mother. She is single (widowed) and her flirtation with a young man turns into a summer romance.

Agostino is mortified to see his idealized mother replaced by a flesh-and-blood woman, whose passions he cannot understand. He runs off and spends time with a gang of lower-class boys. This plunges him further into confusion, as they are more knowing, and subject him to cruelty, violence, and teasing about his sexual ignorance. He also experiences homosexuality and pedophilia without fully understanding what he sees.

The novella is beautifully written, conjuring up memorable summer scenes. It clearly captures Agostino’s anguish as a youth on the brink of sexual awareness, a theme presumably reflecting Moravia’s interest in Freud. While realistic in setting, the situation presents an extreme psychological state, with Agostino an isolated child, lacking friends or relations of his own age, adrift in his confusion, unable to make the transition from childhood with his peers. This setting may reflect Moravia’s illness as a child which prevented him participating in formal education.

Luca:

The second novella concerns a 15-year old, subject to fits of rage when the material world doesn’t meet his desires. Later he withdraws from the world, seeking to reject things which formerly gave him pleasure—his books, stamp collection, etc. There are suggestions that he is also rejecting the middle-class world of his parents, with its worship of money. His withdrawal from the world intensified until, after a crisis and baptism event, he emerges with a new poetic interest in the beauty of the world: “all things would have a meaning for him and would speak to him in their own mute language”. The novella thus ends optimistically with Luca in communication with the world around him, no longer estranged from it and angry at its indifference to him.

At the same time, I felt that Luca goes only part of the way to maturity. He remains determinedly passive at the end of the novella and his vision of life is a “dark, moist cavern of living, maternal flesh into which he could enter confidently, sure that he would be protected there as he had been protected by his mother all the time she was carrying him in her womb”. This sense of renewed infancy brings him a sense of relief. But can he live the rest of his life in a metaphorical womb?

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two very intense novellas of MALE adolescence - a very difficult subject to deal with these days! - by one of Italy's finest-ever writers' Alberto Moravia.
There is very little that is lost in the translations either (Beryl De Zoete/Agostino & Angus Davidson/Disobedience) as they read so well, despite some purple patches of prose that is a characteristic of Moravia's style & inner demons (his fluid sexuality).
Both stories focus on awkward but sensitive boys (!!)...from the ambiguous Italian alta borghesa...middle-class, sibling-free children...discontented...solitary...with parents who wilfully neglect their emotional care...& both stories dissect the struggles of coping with life, dishonesty & sex, in all its myriad manifestations! Moravia was a master at writing about such controversial areas of life in the era of Fascist Italy (1921-1943) & its aftermath into the 1950s. ('Agostino'/1944...'Disobedience'/1950).

These two short novels are not for the 'light-weight' modern readers; your deep concentration is needed to fully appreciate the power of the work & the intensity of the experiences described so poetically & so powerfully.
My suspicion is that such subjective literature today (2000s) would struggle to find a publisher, so obsessed they seem to be with 'cancelling' the male experience & its negative effects on their 'woke' society. (Male, pale & stale?!)
In a weekly book review section of a popular national newspaper, three-quarters of the books reviewed are by women writers....and three out of four of the reviewers are female! So much for equality!
This balance is distorted by the fact that many boys are not encouraged, by predominantly 'woke' female teachers at schools to read books!...& if they are, it's Harry bloody Potter!
Back in the 1960s, when I was at primary school in south London, I hated the stuff that was read to us kids...full of fantasy fairies, talking animals & soppy girls at school!...& though I was in the top reading group of 8 children...only me & Adrian were boys! Small wonder then that we were invited to so many girls' birthday parties at week-ends...but preferred to watch our local football or cricket teams instead! Boys, eh?! Can't deal with them, can you? Just ignore them...& they'll go away!
I'm off now!

[Amerynth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually read a version of this book that was combined with Albert Morvia's novella "Disobedience" that doesn't seem to exist on this The two stories are about teen boys who are beginning to become interested in sex -- though from two very different perspectives.

I found the stories to be OK in both instances.

[gracie dillon · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was fine to read at work, though I’m glad I didn’t pay for it. It was interesting to hear about a man’s inner monologue while going through puberty, but I also despise both of the men in this book, so do with that what you will.

[Simoo]

This just looks very similar to Oyasumi Punpun, Nonetheless masterpiece

[Talita Cruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wenardo

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moravia's novel is a portrayal of the sexual awakening of the thirteen-year-old title character of Agostino. In it we find disobedience and a disagreeable but perceptive story of a different crisis of adolescence.
However, Two Adolescents is really a pair of novelettes, Agostino and Luca, each precise in the portrayal of different personalities and their coming of age. Moravia is well endowed with two qualities which do not often come together in equal proportions: he is both an extremely vigorous, sharply realistic storyteller and a shrewd, searching psychologist. Though written in colloquial and rather graceless prose, his work has a strongly distinctive individuality. It is this that makes the stories of these two boys so vivid. Sensitive and cloistered Agostino finds the shock of love difficult to bear, much less understand. His crisis leads to knowledge without the wisdom that, hopefully, will come with age. Luca is more sophisticated, his introspection and focus on thinking, again without achieving wisdom, leads him in a different direction, yet no less dangerous. The pairing of these two stories in a short novel provides an intriguing exposition of the difficulties of adolescence in an extreme setting.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahhh, now I remember what it was like to be a teenager. The ludicrous self-absorption, the drama, the suicide fantasies. Moravia captures it all perfectly and with acute psychological insight, although it occasionally gets a little too Freudian for my taste, particularly in terms of the imagery.

[N Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a compilation of two novellas, both of which are about male adolescence. Moravia creates an intense and complex psychological portrait of each.

[Theo Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 1 great, second book a bit lack lustre