Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
Chargement... Two Adolescents: Agostino and Disobedience (1952)par Alberto Moravia
Aucun Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Moravia's novel is a portrayal of the sexual awakening of the thirteen-year-old title character of Agostino. In it we find disobedience and a disagreeable but perceptive story of a different crisis of adolescence. However, Two Adolescents is really a pair of novelettes, Agostino and Luca, each precise in the portrayal of different personalities and their coming of age. Moravia is well endowed with two qualities which do not often come together in equal proportions: he is both an extremely vigorous, sharply realistic storyteller and a shrewd, searching psychologist. Though written in colloquial and rather graceless prose, his work has a strongly distinctive individuality. It is this that makes the stories of these two boys so vivid. Sensitive and cloistered Agostino finds the shock of love difficult to bear, much less understand. His crisis leads to knowledge without the wisdom that, hopefully, will come with age. Luca is more sophisticated, his introspection and focus on thinking, again without achieving wisdom, leads him in a different direction, yet no less dangerous. The pairing of these two stories in a short novel provides an intriguing exposition of the difficulties of adolescence in an extreme setting. This volume contains two short novels, each concerning a different teenage boy. The two stories share a common theme: they explore the inner turmoil the boys experience as they move beyond childhood. Central to both is an awareness of the decay of the affection they had previously felt for their parents. In Agostino, the first and shorter of the stories, Agostino is a 13 year old boy and we enter the story at the point this decay begins. In Disobedience, Luca is 15, and all his former regard for his parents is gone. Continued aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série éditorialeEst contenu dansContientDistinctions
Two novels by Alberto Moravia display his gifts as a teller of stories sharp with characterization and deep understanding.Agostino is the story of a sensitive, cloistered boy who, beyond all sense of proportion, loves and idolizes his youthful widowed mother. The shock of finding he is not the center of his mother's universe is more than Agostino can stand. In an instinctive fumbling effort to gain self-respect and values, Agostino joins a gang of older boys who derisively and callously supply him with a quick and drastic sexual education. Agostino finds he has won knowledge without wisdom; and in the words of Moravia. He has lost his first estate without having succeeded in winning another.Luca is more sophisticated, knowing and introspective. When his active mind questions the conventions and routine of everyday life he comes gradually to the conclusion that life is a monstrous conspiracy -- a plot to make one conform at the expense of one's soul. His answer is a complete negation of the pattern of living -- an austere and adolescent reaction that leads him, unwittingly to the brink of death itself, and from which only the purge of violent illness and an unexpected romance save him, mentally and physically, and show him the way to maturity. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)853.91Literature Italian Italian fiction 1900- 20th CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
Est-ce vous ?Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing. |
As you can see from my battered 1960 Penguin edition of Two Adolescents this book has been around for quite a while. The price on the front cover is four shillings, but I picked it up in an Op Shop for 20c over a decade ago. There’s no introduction, only a profile of Alberto Moravia on the back cover, and a blurb for the two short stories Agostino and Disobedience on the inside cover. (The blurb calls them novels but at 83 and 113 pages respectively, they barely qualify as novellas).
Wikipedia amplifies the profile supplied by Penguin. Moravia (1907-1990) was born into a middle class professional family in Rome, but suffered ill health from the time he was nine years old. Confined to bed with TB of the bone, he became a bookish child, learning French and German and reading everything from Boccaccio to Dostoevsky; James Joyce to Shakespeare; and Molière, Gogol and Mallarmé. After he left the sanatorium aged 18, he wrote his first novel Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference), which was published in 1929. Wikipedia describes this novel as typical of Moravia’s themes: a realistic analysis of the moral decadence of a middle-class mother and two of her children.
He became a foreign correspondent but fell foul of the authorities under fascism and his books were banned. It was not until Rome was liberated in 1944 that he was able to resume writing under his own name. He became popular and prolific, and he won various awards and was considered a contender for the Nobel Prize.
Wikipedia tells me that:
( )