I read this book for Italian Lit Month at Winston’s Dad, just scraping in on the second-last day of the month!

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:

Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life and the inability of people to find happiness in traditional ways such as love and marriage are the regnant themes in the works of Alberto Moravia. Usually, these conditions are pathologically typical of middle-class life…(/blockquote>
This certainly seems to be true of Agostino (banned in 1941). Agostino is a naïve middle-class 13-year old boy on holiday with his mother at a coastal resort. (It’s not named, but it’s probably Capri because that’s where he was when he wrote the story). He adores his mother, who is a tall, beautiful woman, and when they go boating together he feels a sense of pride each time he set out with her.
To read the rest of my review please visit
https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/29/agostino-from-two-adolescents-by-alberto-mor...
I will come back here and post my review of the second title some time over the next week...
... and here it is: https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/31/disobedience-from-two-adolescents-by-alberto...

( )

מסיבות טכניות קראתי רק את אחד הסיפורים. מוראביה במיטבו ( )

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 ( )