The Conformist is a novel by Alberto Moravia published in 1951, telling us about the life of a government official during Italy's fascist period and his desire to be normal. What surprised me about this book is how much I enjoyed it considering it was written by the same guy who wrote The Time of Indifference and I did not enjoy that. As I was reading I became almost convinced that this man couldn't have written both books I must be thinking of a different book or a different author when I think of The Time of Indifference so I went back and read my review and yes, it is the same book I had in mind. Well, for whatever reason I enjoyed The Conformist much more than the other one. I read somewhere - I have no idea where - that The Conformist is Moravia's most important work, I don't know if that's true, but it does have me wondering. But on to the book, important or not.Our main character is Marcello Clarici, and in the prologue, we get to witness numerous events from Marcello’s childhood, most of them are not good. At least I don't think they are. As a child first Marcello enjoys going out in the garden armed with a thin, flexible cane and by striking a single blow to the flowers would cut off both the flowers and leaves neatly leaving the decapitated stalks standing erect. He loves doing this for some reason, he feels a sense of power and of justice or some such thing. And while I am still puzzling over his killing all the flowers he begins to coldly kill several lizards in the yard between his home and the home of his neighbor and friend, Roberto. We're told that "The transition from flowers and plants to living creatures was impercetible, as it is in nature." Well that's just wonderful. Marcello apparently discovers that he feels the same pleasure he derived from smashing plants and cutting the heads off flowers by killing lizards. I would say that would be no pleasure, but Marcello isn't me. So once Marcello is surrounded by dead lizards it occurs to him that this might not be normal (really?) so he decides to tell his friend Roberto about it and if Roberto shows the same pleasure in it as Marcello does then that means Marcello must be normal. Unfortunately for Marcello even though he tries to coax Roberto into approving of this behavior, Roberto doesn’t comply, he actually shows horror, they fight and Roberto leaves. So now Marcello is mad and ends up killing Roberto's cat, I guess Roberto not approving was not only unfortunate for Marcello but also for a cat.There are lots of other things about Marcello's childhood that are not normal, at least I hope they're not. His mother almost totally ignores him because of her many "social engagements", and as for his father:"his father's severities were unexpected, unjustified, excessive; inspired more by a wish to make up for lost time after long periods of inattention than by any educational intention. Without warning, after some complaint from Marcello's mother or the cook, he would remember that he had a son, would start shouting at him, getting into a rage with him and striking him. It was the blows that frightened Marcello more than anything, because his father wore on his little finger a ring with a massive setting which, during these scenes, always happened by some means or other to get turned round toward the palm of his hand, thus adding a more penetrating pain to the humiliating severity of the blow. Marcello suspected that his father turned the ring round on purpose, but he was not sure."By now I thought this boy was going to grow up to be a serial killer and that was even before he went to school where he was bullied by his classmates. His classmates would taunt and abuse Marcello because they considered him too feminine calling him Marcellina. I'm not sure about Marcello, but I always hated school, and I didn't have to put up with the things he did. Then one day when some of these bullies attack him on the way home and try to put a skirt on him he is "rescued" by a chauffer named Lino. Lino the hero tells him that he will give him a real pistol if he will go home with him and Marcello agrees. He seems to have no idea why Lino is so desperate to get him to go with him, even when he tells Marcello he is a former priest de-frocked for indecent behavior. Marcello is 13 and I think he would have had a pretty good idea what Lino wanted but he doesn't seem to have a clue. And now with a not so good ending of a scene involving Marcello, Lino the ex-priest and the pistol, the prologue ends. By now I really think he is going to become a serial killer.From here, we jump to Part 1 and Marcello is an adult, about to be married, and searching for normalcy in his life. We are told he is a man just like any other man. He even stops in front of a mirror in a shop window to examine himself to make sure he looks like all the other men around him. He remembers being delighted in college to discover there were thousands of young men just like him. He is delighted when he stops to buy cigarettes that three other people are buying the same brand, he picked the girl he is going to marry because she is "a really normal, ordinary girl" things like that, he's always worried about being normal, ever since the lizard incidents anyway. Marcello has a successful career in the Fascist Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at least I'm assuming he's successful he gets called Dr.Clarici while he's there. Anyway, he is called in to see the Minister (whoever that is) and told to get in touch with Edmondo Quadri, an old professor of his who is now an anti-Fascist leader working in France. I'm not entirely certain whether he was ordered to or volunteered to or it didn't really matter. However Marcello does say:"I'm getting married in a week's time....The mission could be combined with my honeymoon."So that's what he does, gets married and takes his wife, Giulia, a name I'm still trying to figure out how to pronounce, off to Paris for a romantic honeymoon tracking down his professor, Quadri. He finds Quadri who has also married, she is a younger woman named Lina, which since the chauffer of his childhood was named Lino, I would probably picked a name a little bit different than Lina for Quadri's wife. But that is her name and by this time we are into Part II and we have this goofy part where Marcello falls in love with Lina - so I'm assuming he wasn't in love with his wife when he married her, but whether he was or not he now loves Lina about five minutes after he met her, but I suppose I shouldn't consider that too strange because in the same amount of time Lina has fallen in love with Marcello's wife. The only thing that could have made it more complete is if Quadri and Giulia would have fallen in love with each other, but I'll have to settle for them actually loving the people they married. As to why Marcello has to find Quadri in the first place, or rather what will happen when he finds him I'll let you find out for yourself, along with the who ends up with who part of the story. Of course I read so much about some movie made based on the book I'm getting the impression that just about everyone has seen this movie, except me that is, so you probably already know the answers. I did enjoy the book, most of it anyway, and I actually liked the ending. But I still say he should have been a serial killer.
After having watched the movie for Italian class, I decided to read the book in order to compare the two and write an essay on it for class. It was definitely worth reading the book because there are a few interesting differences between the movie and the book, even though a lot of the details and especially the dialogue are the same. I am also glad I read the book because in reading the book you gain a lot more insight into Marcello's character and his family history, and you get to know a little of what his thoughts are and why he does what he does. In the film you're not really sure what he's thinking a lot of the time, especially about Anna and Dr. Quadri. I feel the film did an especially good job of transforming the book so that it was more accessible on screen but I found it interesting how different the endings were. It is fascinating to see how a person can arrange his whole life on trying to be as normal as possible and how skewed it makes his character, how out of touch he is with his feelings, with people around him, and with his actions. He has such difficulty whenever he is in a crowd and someone's individuality shows through because he wishes to identify with the crowd but sees the individuals as beneath him and feels he has nothing at all in common with them. It is clear that Marcello's problems come from his strange upbringing at the hands of a frivolous mother who pays him little attention and a violent father obsessed with his wife's unfaithfulness who also neglects Marcello, so that when he turns to violence and starts killing lizards and a cat his parents don't even notice and thus he feels like he is stuck in some fate where he must be abnormal forever and this leads him to everything that follows.
What do You think about The Conformist (1999)?
What impressed me most about this very European novel is that it combines lengthy passages written in a heavily realistic style with somewhat shorter ones that are dreamlike. Somehow Moravia gets away with this. I believe this novel is often described as the story of a man, Marcello, whose urge to conform causes him to become a fascist. It doesn't seem that way to me. Yes, he does become a fascist but as 'Il Conformists' closes, Marcello accepts the verdict of Lino t hat everything is determined by "fatalità," It's the story of a man who becomes a fatalist, incapable of perceiving meaning in anything.
—Jake Fuchs
For years I've been a huge fan of Bertolucci's film adaptation of The Conformist, and am now a huge fan of Moravia's book that inspired it.I'm not sure I can recall ever reading a piece of "literature" that I would also qualify as a page-turner (with no offense meant to either category).An unmistakable sign that a book is good, in my opinion: I missed my train stop one evening while reading, so engaged was I in this masterful probing of an ordinary but psychologically tormented man hellbent on achieving normality in Fascist Italy.I plan on seeing the film again soon, not so much to compare it to the book, but because I find the story so thought-provoking and worthy of examination.I generally feel a film is a success if it sends one back to the source material; in this instance, I feel as though I may be going back and forth for a while as I ponder Moravia's question of what "normal" means.
—Stephen
A Psychological ThrillerSome of my favourite films explore how people have dealt with life under Fascism or Communism: * Istvan Szabo’s "Mephisto" (Germany);* Ingmar Bergman’s "The Serpent’s Egg" (Sweden); * Bernardo Bertolucci’s "The Conformist" (Italy); * Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s "The Lives of Others" (Germany).Not only do they help understand the relationship of an individual to an authoritarian regime, but they also explore existentialist issues that became more pressing in the context of the Second World War and the post-war environment.Bertolucci’s wonderful film was an adaptation of this book, the title of which announces Alberto Moravia’s intention to construct a novel that is at once both psychological and socio-political.If you haven’t seen the film, I urge you to seek it out. Whether or not you get to see the film, I recommend that you read this novel.To be honest, during the first half, I wondered whether Moravia had failed to lift his work above the ideas that formed his subject matter. (1) However, his prose is lean, the novel is very easy to read, and ultimately it took on the feel of a psychological thriller. No wonder that it was made into a film.Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 adaptation of Moravia's novel "The Conformist."A Note about SpoilersWhile I have incidentally mentioned aspects of plot more than I normally do in my reviews, I have tried to limit myself to the "set-up" of two of the major plot issues: the conformity of the Conformist and his engagement with the Non-Conformist.I have tried to avoid any detail or implication about what follows, except to the extent that I mention the abstract nature of his own self-realisation (but not the trigger of it). (2)The Abnormal ChildThe protagonist is 30 year old Dr. Marcello Clerici, a medium ranking public servant in the pre-war Government of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party, soon to become a one-off secret agent.When we meet him, he is a relatively innocent 13 year old. At various times, Moravia describes him as timid, feminine, impressionable, unmethodical, imaginative, impetuous, passionate, confiding, expansive, sometimes positively exuberant.Nevertheless, he gets into some mischief, which causes his parents’ housekeeper to remark:"You begin by killing a cat and you end by killing a man."In time, Marcello (view spoiler)[is accosted by a pederast, which subsequently dictates the fate of both of them, and (hide spoiler)]
—Ian Agadada-Davida
