Well. This one had its moments. The first thing that jumps to mind, for everyone I’m sure, is Freud and his psychosexual theories. I’m not going to get into the details, as most people are probably familiar with these ideas (the Oedipus complex, etc.) but this novel clearly reflects some of those ideas, and I was not surprised to read in the translator’s note that Moravia had demonstrated an interest for Freudian psychology in his previous work. It’s clear that he is trying to paint Agostino in a distinctly Freudian light in this novel, with the sexual confusion and at times hatred directed towards his mother.

There are lots of passages worths discussing here, but I’ll point out a couple moments that stuck out to me. First, on p. 46, “he preferred not to love her at all and see her as merely a woman.” To me, this quote reveals the distinction between love and lust, implying that Agostino’s mother can only be loved as a maternal figure, but once she is “just a woman”, she is seen as a sexual object and no longer a worthy recipient of this love. Similarly, on p. 88 he sees the young man kissing “a woman”- not his mother, but someone separate. Agostino struggles with this new separation- this is not the woman that raised him and nurtured him with maternal affection, but a new seductive, sexual being. Or, and perhaps this is at the root of his anxieties, she is both at the same time – an overlap he cannot make sense of in his pre-adolescent mind. His ill-fated trip to the brothel is a desperate last ditch effort to rid himself of this overlap and replace the sensual image of his mother with someone else entirely, so that he can revert her back to the former, purely maternal image he holds in his mind.

Agostino has clearly been somewhat sheltered from the real world, largely due to his social class and strong attachment to his mother. He is coddled and dependent on her love and attention, so anything that distracts her from this leaves him jealous and sulky. I think this sheltering plays a considerable role in his frustration- he had no real notion of what sex entailed before meeting the group of boys at Vespucci beach.  These feelings of repulsion towards his mother, then, stem from a newfound awareness, along with a shift into puberty that his mind maybe hasn’t caught up with it. This sudden realization of a world he had previously been blind to results in a resentment for the woman that raised him simply because she is a woman, and is therefore capable of arousing these forbidden impulses in him. I wonder if Agostino knows what puberty is – maybe he would benefit from a sex ed course.

There are many other aspects of this novel that I would love to delve into- the dynamic of the gang of boys, the pedophilic Saro and his exploitation of Homs, and so on… but alas, we’ve hit the word count.

My question- do you think Agostino’s fixation on his mother reflects something more sinister than just a strange expression of puberty?