Moravia

    While reading Agostino I was disturbed by the relationship between thirteen-year-old Agostino and his mother. It quickly became clear that Agostino had a less than innocent attraction towards her. I think Moravia was direct with regard to  Freud’s Oedipus Complex as Agostino was entering a reality where he realizes that he unconsciously desires a sexual union with his mother and spends the remainder of the book trying to repress it. When his mother starts to spend time with her new love interest Renzo, Agostino feels neglected and jealous. The summer was the start of his sensual awakening, not only did he feel pride for being associated with his mother’s beauty, but with the association of his new friends, he learnt what his desires meant and why he didn’t like his mom spending time with Renzo.

    Agostino’s shame later turns to anger towards his mother for example on page 69 “unable to bear his mother’s unawareness or his own attentions, he wanted to shout, “Cover yourself, stop showing yourself to me, I’m not who I used to be.” He uses his new friends as a distraction from his situation with his mother, but the more time he spends with them the more he comes to realize how naive and childish he is. They expose him to rough behaviours, a perspective on the low-income class, and gave him a strong male presence that he had been lacking since the death of his father. They viewed him as weak and sheltered, so he had to work on being the person he thought they wanted him to be. His newfound sexuality paired with his new friends gives him an overwhelming escalation into manhood. The change that happened within him this summer had already been a source of suffering for him and getting kicked out of the house of prostitutes gave him the idea that he was still young and how he was not yet a man “and many unhappy days would pass before he became one.”

    Overall I thought the story was well written and an easy read. It had a number of well presented themes that I enjoyed, including class, sexuality, and coming of age. I thought the author’s psychoanalytic approach illustrated Agostino’s agony of his position and attraction to his mother.  My question for the class is how do you think Agostino’s relationship/attraction to his mother will affect his future relationships?

  Nada by Carmen Laforet really captured my attention as the book was filled with drama, relationships and betrayal surrounding a young university student. Laforet did an excellent job in portraying the characters as somewhat delusional as I often found myself questioning many of their actions. Although this book has a lot to unpack, this …

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Alberto Moravia’s Agostino depicts the confusion, family, and other interpersonal relationships, as well as the aim to reach the state of adulthood of a thirteen-year-old boy fascinatingly. In this book, it can be seen that the protagonist, Agostino, has a complex, intersective, and relatively interdependent relationship with two images that contribute to the development of […]