Destiny Leaves Man No Innocence

It is disturbing to open a bottle labeled "champagne" and find it full of beer instead. And after becoming used to such works as "The Woman of Rome," and "Two Adolescents" from the pen of Alberto Moravia, it is disturbing to read his "The Conformist."

Moravia, leader of the post-war literary renaissance in Italy, retains his now-famous style in his latest work, but loses force by abandoning his familiar, single-purpose approach. Instead of dealing with the story of one aspect of life as seen through the eyes of one person at one point in his life, Moravia attempts to show the metamorphosis of a man from one philosophy to another through a series of singular, often disjointed, events. The evolution is further confused by detailed descriptions of the other characters which have little to do with the theme.

This theme is simply that "we all lose our innocence, one way or another; it's the normal thing." The story tells of a man, from the time he was 13 who shot and, he thought, killed another man, until he is 33 and finds his "victim" still alive.

In the 20 years between, he feels his life was shaped by his first crime, which affirmed, for him, a boyhood suspicion that he was different from other people. So he consciously enforces "normality" on himself, makes himself act like the people around him, advocates order and authority; joins the Fascist Party as a secret policeman, and marries a "normal" girl he does not love. When he finds alive the man he thought he had shot, he realizes that the act had nothing to do with shaping his life. The book concludes that man is snared in his own destiny.

"The Conformist," as the other Moravia books, puts a great deal of emphasis on sex. But the Italian has not lost his talent of giving unusual outcomes to actual situations.

But basically, this form which Moravia brought to perfection in his first two books, is carried out in "Two Adolescents" where a dilerious boy imagines his room and bed crawling with filth and vermin. The reality of his early works is missing and the book becomes a more confusion of philosophies and a jumble of imageries.