The Time of Indifference by Alberto Moravia: Plot, Characters and Themes

The plot of “The Time of Indifference”

The novel covers a few days in the life of the Ardengo family, in Rome. Mariagrazia, the widowed mother of Carla and Michele, has taken up with Leo Merumeci. On Carla’s twenty-fourth birthday, Leo tries to take advantage of her by getting her drunk. The attempt fails: Carla falls ill and vomits, and the scene stops there. Michele, Carla’s brother, and Lisa, a woman smitten with him, move around this episode.

Practical example: the scene of Carla’s birthday shows the theme of indifference in action. Leo tries to take advantage of her by getting her drunk, the plan falls apart when Carla falls ill, and none of those present draws a conclusion of their own: the episode simply happens, and the family goes back to its routine life.

The characters: the Ardengo family and the others

For the two siblings, Carla and Michele Ardengo, nothing in the novel ever provokes a genuine moral reaction. Michele, in particular, is described as a weak man, much like his sister Carla. Mariagrazia, their mother, lives a routine life bound to the moral cliches of the middle class. Leo Merumeci is her lover; Lisa is smitten with Michele.

For Moravia’s full biography, the Recap on Alberto Moravia: life and the novel of existential unease covers the writer’s entire story. The same period of Italian fiction is also covered in the Recaps on Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello.

Behind the scenes: self-funded publication

According to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, published by Treccani, Moravia began writing the novel in Bressanone, where he was recovering from Pott’s disease, a form of bone tuberculosis. In 1925, at eighteen, he left the sanatorium and moved to Bressanone; over the following three years, between Bressanone and Rome, he wrote “The Time of Indifference”.

A first publisher rejected the manuscript. Moravia then paid to publish it himself, at a cost of 5,000 lire of the time, through the Milan publisher Alpes, thanks to its director Cesare Giardini and with financial help from his father. The title “Gli indifferenti” was the final one chosen, not the first Moravia had considered for the book. Printing of the volume finished on 2 May 1929.

The backlash: from critics to the fascist regime

The first review appeared almost two months after printing had finished, on 30 June 1929, in the fortnightly magazine Augustea, edited by Franco Ciarlantini (the founder of Alpes) and signed by A. R. Ferrarin. Two more reviews followed on 21 July 1929, in L’Italia letteraria (Cesare Zavattini) and in the Corriere della Sera (Giuseppe Antonio Borgese); the latter decided the novel’s success.

Not every reaction was favorable. Beyond objections to structural flaws and to how unfinished the characters felt as artistic creations, the more hardline fascist press accused the novel of morbidity and defeatism. On 31 October 1929, in a speech at the Casa del Fascio in Milan, Arnaldo Mussolini, brother of Benito Mussolini, called Moravia a “denier of every human value”. Through the 1930s and 1940s, to avoid the regime’s censors, Moravia wrote mostly in a surreal, allegorical style.

Style and themes: indifference as a moral refusal

The novel’s style has been described as a singular realism, marked by a provocative objectivity. A detached observer portrays the decline of a humanity unable to reach for any ideal; sex and money, in the novel, work as substitutes for it and turn out to be interchangeable with one another. The prose stays sharp and precise, close to things as they are.

The title puts the book’s underlying theme on the cover: characters who watch what happens to them without drawing any judgment of their own. Alongside it sits incommunicability: the members of the Ardengo family live under the same roof without ever truly understanding one another. The novel is a realistic study of the moral decline of a middle-class mother and two of her children, and through this family story it ends up describing the middle class under fascism. Critics of the time described it as a notable example of contemporary Italian fiction; later, the book came to be seen as a landmark for the realist turn it set in motion, one that anticipated the narrative direction of the 1930s.