Life of Moravia

THE EXTRAORDINARY self-posession of Alberto Moravia can be traced to the many months he endured as a child and as a young man, confined to his bed, entirely alone, with nothing but books and his imagination to carry him through a long struggle against tuberculosis of the bone. He had no friends, no social life, no years at a university to connect him to the world. The result was a kind of unblinking gaze and acceptance of life which made him first one of the great novelists of the age, and finally one of the great memoirists. The Time of Indifference, his first novel (published this season by Steerforth), begun when he was only eighteen and published three years later, in 1929, changed the Italian literary landscape forever. That early fame never died and later novels - The Woman of Rome, The Conformist - only enhanced his reputation. Moravia put his life into his books but only now, with this unusual autobiography in the form of an interview with his friend, the writer Alain Elkann, is it possible to understand the literary use he made of the bourgeois world of his childhood in Rome, of his encounter with Fascism under Mussolini, of his months in hiding from the Germans in the mountains south of Rome, and of his marriages to two of the leading writers of his time - Elsa Morante and Dacia Maraini.