What do You think about Agostino (2003)?
Moravia’s ”Agostino” is about the naivety of a child that becomes an awkward adolescent in mind and spirit and implores the boundary of adolescence and manhood. ”The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn’t imagine when it would end.”Agostino is a feeble-bodied, yet healthy teenager of thirteen years from an upper middle-class to wealthy family and what I would deem a ‘mama’s boy’. With the encounter of a young boatman flirting with his mother brings on the question of her dignity, from his point of view, and his strange filial fantasies of his mother as she engages with this new, younger man; taking place of Agostino as the man in her life. Agostino is repulsed by his mother and her actions, but also repulsed by his oedipal complex as it lingers in his mind. His insatiable feelings towards her control him and confuse him in ways he cannot understand.With these feelings inside, he looks elsewhere for peace of mind. Questions are stated and imposed upon the reader and Agostino strives to find answers to those questions that he has within. As he distances himself from his mother and boyfriend, he finds himself upon a ragtag group of indigent age-like children that he cannot relate to, but the reader discovers that this is just an acting out for attention as he cannot attain it from elsewhere. The unpleasant nature of his transition as an adolescent are described in the later pages as his mother replies to his comment: ”You always treat me like a baby!” and in retort fashion, she exclaims, ”All right, then, from now on I’ll treat you like a man”.Agostino seems to find the answers to his questions by finally realizing to himself:”Like a man,” he couldn’t help but think to himself before falling asleep. But he wasn’t a man, and many unhappy days would pass before he became one.”Moravia seems to epitomize how early life’s inquiries trouble the mind and how the people around you affect and are affected by your actions and emotions during those years.
—Josh
This is a bildungsroman for the modern world, or at least a post-Freudian world. Agostino is a 13-year-old boy visiting the Italian beach for the summer with his mother, a still beautiful, upper-class widow. Everything is going well until Agostino's mum becomes very interested in a young man meet at the beach, who has replaced Agostino in the daily rowing excursions out to sea. What is a young boy to do? Make some friends might be your answer, and that is exactly what Agostino does. The problem is, the friends are the local children of the fisherman and wharf workers of the town, and are much more canny, experienced, cruel, and knowing that poor little Agostino. Also, Agostino's wealthy upbringing and sensitive disposition make him a likely and easy target for the rest of the gang, who, as most boys of this age do, let him into the group in order to torment, tease, and exploit him, and also to discuss the sexual activity of his mother—who hasn't escaped their attention—in front of him. Quite a summer of adolescence. Proust eat your heart out.So not only does Agostino have to quickly deny his class and emotions, but he quickly has to accept the other boys' brutal understanding of sex, even more complicated by the fact that he is the target of the adult leader of the group, a not-so-veiled pedophile who has usually made do with the one black boy in the gang, but now sees Agostino as a new partner. Even though nothing happens, Agostino has a tough time rejecting the accusations, as his learning of sexuality wavers between the models of pedophiles, his own mother, and the boasts of the bigger boys, Agostino has lost his innocence in a very real way. Not how one would want to see a son become a young man, at least I wouldn't, but that I think might partially be the point. We don't get to chose how or when we become an adult. What the lessons will be, and what we take from them, cannot be planned by parents, teachers, priests, or even ourselves. Often the people least fit to teach us about sex are the ones to do it. And that's a lesson one doesn't quickly, or ever, forget. Am I making this to be more funny than it sounds? Moravia is not really about compassion, his view is a deep and persistent look at the psyche of modern man (after having read Contempt) and all the stupid things that go into it. Why not start at the beginning of adulthood? Not the youthful blossoming of perception and allusions and art and understanding that Proust loves so much, but the brutal, smelly, fleshy reality that many teens had that one magical summer.
—Nicholas During
تصف الرواية حالة الطهرانية التي تمر بها علاقة أوغستينو بأمه طبعاً من جهته هو، فالأمر لا يقف عند عدم تقبله رؤية رجلٍ آخر مكان أبيه الراحل، بل عدم رغبته برؤية رجلٍ بالمطلق، و تكتمل معاناة أوغستينو في سن البلوغ، حين يبدأ باكتشاف مكامن رغباته، و جسد أمه الذي يبدأ محرماً ثم غريباً ثم مرغوباً كفكرة للاكتشاف لا مرغوباً للمعاشرة، يصف مورافيا هذه العلاقة في داخل نفس أوغستينو و من خارج أفكارها بتعليقات الصبية الذين تعرّف عليهم فبدأ باكتشاف ما كان يظنه انحطاطات الإنسان الجنسية.أوغستينو ذاته لا يستطيع تجاوز حالة الصراع هذه بدخول الشاب الذي تخرج معه أمه لذا يفتّش في أيامه عمن يساعده على تجاوز ازدرائه لأمه التي يراها لعوباً تفرّط بجسدها، هذا البحث يقوده لاكتشاف جسد صديقة أمه، للبحث عن الدعارة و هو لم يكمل الثالثة عشر من عمره، ثم الخيبة التي تصيبه لعدم قدرته على إدراك هذا الاكتشاف.لا تصف الرواية هذه العلاقة فقط، بل تصف علاقات الإنسان بالإنسان من حيث هي في جزءٍ منها علاقات منحطة و انتهازية، و كذلك يصف الصراع الطبقي الذي يعانيه المجتمع الإيطالي، و هذه إحدى ثيمات روايات مورافيا كما هو حال المسألةالجنسية .
—دايس محمد
