Themes and Literary Style
Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life, and the substantial incapability of people finding 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; marriage, in particular, is the target of works such as Disobedience and L'amore coniugale ("The Conjugal Love") (1949). Alienation is the theme in works such as Il disprezzo ("Contempt" or "A Ghost at Noon") (1954) and La noia ("The Empty Canvas") from the 1950s, despite observation from a rational-realistic perspective. Political themes are often present: an example is La Romana ("The Woman of Rome") (1947), the story of a prostitute entangled with the Fascist regime and with a network of conspirators. The extreme sexual realism in La noia ("The Empty Canvas") (1960) introduced the psychologically experimental works of the 1970s.
Moravia's writing style was highly regarded for being extremely stark and unadorned, characterised by very elementary, common words within an elaborate syntax. A complex mood is established by mixing a proposition constituting the description of a single psychological observation mixed with another such proposition. In the later novels, the inner monologue is prominent.
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