1934

Moravia's political fable about an Italian anti-Fascist and the frightened, suicide-seeking German girl he encounters on a boat to Capri--the setting of Moravia's Il disprezzo from 1954--was welcomed as one of his finest novels. Stephen Spender for The New York Review of Books commented: "One of the most brilliant strokes in this novel about relations in the Thirties between Italians and Germans is that Moravia never reveals whether his Italian narrator and hero is serious or not, and doubt about the seriousness lies in his being Italian.... This is the truth of the book: that within the…