Hellooo once again blog :)) (please know I went a medium bit above the word limit, so this is a longer one, sorry not sorry)
This week’s read was Agostino by Alberto Moravia, and I can openly admit I went into this book with the wrong expectations. When I read the blurb in the “choose your own adventure” page on our website, I was like “Oh cool!! Agostino is gonna figure out he is gay!!! Ok Moravia, very progressive writing for your time there, I see you!!”. Oh, how I was wrong. I was so, SO wrong.
So yeah, little rich boy Agostino is head over heels in love with his mother. Just completely enamored. I thought Combray was bad when it came to the mommy issues, but Agostino tramples that. Multiple times over. The whole book follows the idea that Agostino used to see his mother as something akin to a saint, but with this vacation, he realizes his mom is a very desirable woman to the people around him, and apparently to him as well. Everyone wants to fuck his mom, and the book is 102 pages of Agostino realizing that apparently so does he. I have to admit, the journey for this kid to get to this conclusion is full of some very well-written emotional turmoil, but that doesn’t make this any less weird. I mean, it will never be not-weird to read about how he goes from “wow my mom is so beautiful everyone should be jealous that I row her boat” to “I hate my mom >:((” to then go “oh shit I guess yeah, my mom is a Woman and hot, and I guess I am indeed attracted to her”… But at least its well written!!
I *have* to mention how sex is depicted in this book. It’s depicted as something wrong, and as something that should be illegal and hidden, and yet happens anyway. We have mom and pretty guy literally fucking on the boat while Agostino is there (which by the way, WHAT THE FUCK.), then we have the boy gang being in charge of teaching Agostino what sex is after bullying the shit out of him. Which leads us to Saro and the fucking boat. WHAT ARE WE DOING? Why did my only hope for adult supervision of these troubled boys turn out to be a PERVERT?!?!?! Man….. You’d think we’d stop there. We don’t! Because we have the whole brother sequence of events to go through still. All of this goes to say that the way intimacy and sex are depicted throughout this book makes it seem so taboo, which I think was an interesting choice.
The last thing I want to mention is how innocence is depicted. Throughout the whole book, Agostino is set on not being a boy but being a strong, not innocent, capital m Man. And he almost feels anguished when he fails to be that. He keeps hanging out with these boys who are so clearly being horrible to him because he so desperately wants to grow up. He wants his mom to see him like she sees the pretty man. Which is incredibly Oedipus complex-y, which Freud would be very proud of. But what really gets me is that at the end of chapter 3, we see that there is a part of him that does not want to be a Man. He realizes how much of a toll growing up takes, and he says that “The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn’t imagine when it would end” (67). Yes, puberty fucking sucks, but not as bad as Agostino is making himself believe it is. But then again, I wasn’t a teenage boy in love with my mom when puberty hit me, so maybe the death of innocence would really seem like the end of the world if that was the case. But overall, the depiction of innocence and the loss of that is such a key and interesting line to follow throughout the story.
As you can probably tell, this book was a rollercoaster. I was constantly asking myself, “What the fuck is going on right now?”, and then continuing to read with my eyebrows increasingly higher on my forehead and my jaw dropping increasingly lower. But it was an interesting read. Not my favourite so far, but definitely an interesting experience. I leave you with this final question: What the fuck is up with these older stories and having little boys be in love with their moms? Why were we doing that?
Now, before I go, I need to tell you that the title fight for this blog was very tight, and the runner-up was “Freud must have been so upset he died 5 years before this book was published”. With Freud in mind, I decided to start the-
Freud Tally!!!!!!!!!
This is where I’ll be tallying all the books I read for this class based on whether they would make Freud proud or not, aka if they present “little boy has a weirdly romantic and sexual relationship with his mom” syndrome.
So yeah!! Thank you for reading, I’ll see yall in the next one :))
✨Freud Tally!!!!!!!!!✨
Makes Freud proud- 2 (Combray, Agostino)
Knows Freud had no credentials to do psychology- 2 (Mad Toy, The Shrouded Woman)
7 replies on ““We shouldn’t be fucking MILFs, it ruined my life”- a MILF’s son’s memoir”
“As you can probably tell, this book was a rollercoaster. I was constantly asking myself, “What the fuck is going on right now?”, and then continuing to read with my eyebrows increasingly higher on my forehead and my jaw dropping increasingly lower. But it was an interesting read.”
I think you summarized the reading experience pretty well!!
Share it on class!
Julián.
YES oh my goodness. I also read the blurb and I ALSO came into this book with the expectation that Agostino was going to have a gay awakening, and unfortunately when he encountered Berto and the group of boys I was almost more inclined to encourage the weird Freudian obsession he was developing towards his mom because those boys were actually feral to the point where I was terrified for Agostino.
Fun question, by the way–fully agree. What a peculiar trend. Funnily enough, I was rereading the story of Oedipus earlier this week and it got me thinking along the same lines like ‘so did they come up with this story to try and justify some guy having a thing for his mom? what even was the intention there?’ and the same thing happened last week in my PSYC class when we talked about Freud. I have a sneaking suspicion that Freud was drawing some of his oedipal ideas from firsthand experience, which honestly made me question the narrator and author the whole time I was reading Agostino.
Might have to come back in the future to check in on the Freud tally, though I hope there are more books in the ‘Knows Freud had no credentials to do psychology’ category.
I feel like we have a bunch of old stories with little boys in love with their mom is because they had a very conservative view on sex and sexuality making everything taboo, these teenage boys didn’t have proper education and interaction with girls or women, making their mom the only woman they can project their expectations of ‘grown up’ knowledge upon. If they actually had daily conversations with women their age and not see women as objects maybe they will see their moms as an individual instead of wive figure or a projection of their fantasies.
hii your title immediately caught my attention lol !! and I especially loved your observation that sex in Agostino is portrayed as both deeply repressed and somehow everywhere at once, that tension explains so much about why the novel feels so unsettling.
Julya!! You definitely intrigued me with your title on this one and I’m not disappointed! I’m 100% on the same page as you with your initial intrigue in this book — I thought I was going to get a little “Call Me By Your Name”-esque summer read and this… wasn’t that. I do agree that it was an interesting read, even if only out of my own morbid curiosity lol!
Great title, really entertaining blog post, had just as much fun reading this as reading the book itself.”
I don’t know about an overall trend, but at least in these books, Combray and Agostino I think one of the main things is that they’re all showing the precariousness of these kids at a young transitional period (early 10s). And they don’t really have any other external authority systems or figures around them besides their family. If I recall correctly, it wasn’t until like the 1950s that the adolescent class really became a thing – you were a kid and then thrust into the adult world. And there was no proper schooling systems, really, no secondary school for the teenager years. So the kids naturally latched onto your parents. And either the father figure isn’t that prominent or he’s already dead.
tldr maybe if the novel showed Agostino going to school and he had a MILF teacher or other fellow teenagers to get horny for he wouldn’t have these mommy issues. just my theory
Hi! I really enjoy reading your blog. I like how you are comparing Combray and Agostino.
In Combray, the narrator mentions his father a great amount of time in the book. I remember he loves a kind of dessert and the maid in their house makes that for him. Overall, I think even though the narrator wants his mother’s kiss, he does not see that as an “affection” that Agostino sees in his emotion towards his mother.