Alberto Moravia: life and the novel of existential unease

Who Alberto Moravia was

Alberto Moravia is the pen name under which the world knows Alberto Pincherle, born in Rome in 1907 and dead in the same city in 1990. He chooses this name for his very first novel and signs his entire career with it. He grows up in a comfortable bourgeois family, a setting he later turns into critical material on the page.

His work spans almost the whole of the Italian 20th century, from fascism through the postwar years to the economic boom. He is not an isolated case: together with Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello, Moravia belongs to a generation of writers who put at the center of their novels characters unable to find a stable place in the world around them.

The debut novel: The Time of Indifference

Moravia debuts in 1929 with «The Time of Indifference» (Gli Indifferenti), considered a landmark of 20th-century Italian fiction. The novel follows a bourgeois family sliding into moral decline under fascism, with characters who watch their own ruin without reacting. Encyclopedia.com reads the novel as an indictment of an Italian bourgeoisie caught in the middle of its own moral decay, translated into English first as «The Indifferent Ones» in 1932 and later as «The Time of Indifference» in 1953.

That indifference the title points to marks the first portrait of an unease Moravia keeps exploring throughout his career. The same theme resurfaces, in a different form, in the work of Italo Svevo: the narrator of Zeno’s Conscience watches himself with the same detached inability to act.

The novels that followed

Over the next three decades Moravia publishes a run of novels that remain among his most read: «Agostino» in 1944, «Conjugal Love» in 1949, «The Conformist» in 1951, «A Ghost at Noon» in 1954, «Two Women» in 1957 and «Boredom» in 1960. Several find a publisher outside Italy quickly: «The Conformist» comes out in English the same year as the Italian edition, «A Ghost at Noon» is the English title given to «Il Disprezzo» in 1955, and «Two Women» is the English title of «La Ciociara», published in 1958.

Novel	Year
The Time of Indifference	1929
Agostino	1944
Conjugal Love	1949
The Conformist	1951
A Ghost at Noon	1954
Two Women	1957
Boredom	1960

For Treccani, these novels share two poles, purity and corruption, and a steady eye on the changes reshaping Italian society. «The Time of Indifference» and «Boredom» each have a dedicated Recap with the plot and characters.

Existential unease in Moravia’s characters

According to another Treccani entry, Moravia’s characters remain figures of minor dramatic weight, fixed inside a grey setting that never changes. They watch their own condition without being able to alter it.

Encyclopedia.com traces the root of this unease to a precise cause, according to Moravia himself: a relationship with reality that has broken down. That reading helps explain why «Boredom», published in 1960 and translated into English the following year as «The Empty Canvas», remains one of his most cited novels on the subject. In this novel specifically, Treccani sees a case of neocapitalist alienation.

Comparing Moravia with other 20th-century authors helps place him. While Luigi Pirandello builds his characters’ inadequacy around the fragmentation of identity, Moravia ties it more often to the social setting his novels move through: the bourgeoisie under fascism, then postwar affluence.

Recognition and place in the Italian 20th century

Moravia receives two of the most important Italian literary prizes: the Strega Prize in 1952, two years before «A Ghost at Noon», and the Viareggio Prize in 1961, the year after «Boredom». His work circulates abroad early too. «The Time of Indifference» reaches English readers in 1932 and again in 1953, «Agostino» in 1947, «The Conformist» the same year as its 1951 Italian edition, «A Ghost at Noon» in 1955 and «Two Women» in 1958 — a pace of translation that follows nearly every novel from the 1940s onward.

More than a century after his birth, his novels remain a reference point for readers looking, in 20th-century Italian fiction, for a clear-eyed portrait of existential unease.