Description: The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following the World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a writer whom as Anthony Burgess once remarked, was "always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio."
Review Quotes: "In its moral and artistic economy, [Boredom] is perhaps the most successful of all Moravia's work. . . .No one has depicted a series of carnal acts, frenzied yet cold in their automatism--nudity, desire and its outlet--with such complete lack of complacence, such impassive truthfulness."--Nicola Chiaromonte, Partisan Review
"Precise, calculating, decadent and quite brilliant." --Kirkus Reviews "Boredom is Moravia's most succinct exploration of the quiet desperation at the heart of the automated human...one of Moravia's funniest explorations on the origins of middle-class funk." --Bill Marx, Boston Review