Luca by Alberto Moravia (1948)

Translated from the original Italian, the title of this ought to be Disobedience, but this translation is included in an early 50s American volume entitled Two Adolescents, and follows on from Agostino, so its title was changed to fit. The translation reads masterfully, and research confirms that Angus Davidson, who was responsible, remained the major translator of Moravia for most of his career, and also worked on pieces by Mario Praz, Giuseppe Berto and Natalia Ginzburg, among others. Moravia's scheme here is to relate to the reader the workings of the mind of a young intelligent adolescent as he matures. It's not easy to say exactly how he succeeds, only to know that he does. And of course this is why someone of the class of Davidson as translator is so important. Moravia's subtle grip on the combination of egotism, wonder, sensuality and spoiltness in Luca's mind, and on how those and other elements concatenate and influence one another, spurring changes and eras of thought, is phenomenal. It's also very interesting to note the tendency toward existentialism that dominates the first part of the book, as Luca feels a growing sense of betrayal by his parents' (and the world's) vulgarity and the development in him of a 'desire for death' as a rejection of the terms of living, if these abject examples are the only currency. Two sexual adventures then intervene, one a non-starter with a governess which doesn't shift his perspective other than as an experience of frustration and fascination, and the other with a home nurse after his health has collapsed in fever. This second affair occurs after he returns to full consciousness with a sense of passive but fundamental reinstillment of belief in life. Moravia leaves us with Luca travelling to a sanatorium which his mother has organised to complete his cure, on a train high in the mountains, and the sense that this passivity itself, currently seeming to Luca like the great answer to all his philosophical questions about how life should be lived, is yet another era whose endtime will have to come. In its limpidity and psychological truth, this is quietly brilliant.

Commonplace Book

'"Oh, yes, the English are consummate hypocrites. But there's only one objection to their hypocrisy - it so rarely covers any wickedness. It's such a disappointment to see a creature stalking towards you, laboriously draped in sheep's clothing, and then to discover that it's only a sheep..."'

from The Invisible Prince, a piece in Comedies and Errors by Henry Harland

Commonplace Book

'Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of frenzies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire...'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 44)