Even though I am shocked, I feel bad for Agostino too…
- From the beginning, I could tell the story started to go in a weird direction, especially when I read the depiction of how he feels proud of the attention his mother receives and the envy he imagines from others. And he feel disappointed when he saw his mother’s eager of being with other men when his mother accepted the invitation of a boat ride from a young man, thinking his mother does not belong to him in the way he imagined, this unsettled him and triggered him of the past he does not wish to recall.
-
- This opening places strong emphasis on the description of the physical body, as well as on how Agostino pays attention to his mother, keeping Agostino’s world small and exclusive to her. This suggests that in Agostino’s boyhood, after his father’s death, his mother is all he has. He looks only at his mother and belongs only to her, and therefore believes that he occupies the same exclusive position in her life as well.
- In this world he has ideally created, everything feels safe and secure. The emotional roles are clearly defined, and his identity is stable, while the relation is solely exclusive between his mother and him — everyone plays their own roles: his mother belongs to him, and other people are strangers outside their world who pose a threat to him (so he thinks everyone else is jealous of him!) However, he is in a state of conflict, on the one hand, he feels good to see people jealous him, on the other hand, he feels disappointed to be excluded.
- Thus, he soon understands that he no longer holds a privileged position in his mother’s decision when he realizes his mother’s actively eager to be with other men, this mother-son world started to fall.
-
- He soon turns into adulthood. When he cannot stand this mess, he starts to keep himself away from his mother and tries to get along with a group of aggressive and crude boys, who speak openly and violently about sex. Agostino wishes to be involved with them and wants their sympathy, hoping to become a man by staying with them. But they do not provide any positive response; instead, they mock Agostino’s innocence, humiliate him, and bring him emotional degradation.
-
- Among this group of boys, I feel like the sexuality is linked tightly to power, cruelty and dominance, and be used as a topic of conversation to brag about. And it reveals that how the masculinity is performed through humiliation and aggression, and these means become a way to show off a man’s power and masculinity. Agostino’s previous life could never give him such permission to get involved with those boy, so he is neither accepted by the group (as a sign of grown up), nor be able to return back to his childhood world (still be regarded as a boy).
- I think that in the process of Agostino’s fast growth from a boy to a man, it is not a gain, but a loss. He grows without proper guidance, experiencing only brutal exposure. He loses the perfect image of his mother in his own world and loses the feeling of safety from his boyhood, yet never truly gains the power to become mature. It is not a man growing up from a boy, but a boy forced to accept a cold world without sympathy.
Just as the video lecture mentioned, this book focuses only on a short period of Agostino’s experience, so we are not able to see his day-to-day life. I think he is growing up in a very fast way and can never return to his previous life, but I do not think he has become a man (at least not ready to be a man!).