ALBERTO MORAVIA, THE CONFORMIST

Just finished rereading this novel set in Italy and France on the eve of the Second World War. I’ve admired Moravia ever since first reading him while learning Italian in the mid 1970s and been intrigued by fascism ever since studying it as an undergraduate in the early 1970s. The Conformist is among the most subtle probes into the mentality behind fascism that I’ve ever come across. I find it very easy to empathise with the way the protagonist, Marcello, craves to fit in so much that he embraces what we might call the ‘inner fascist.’ Moravia very skilfully portrays anti-fascists though the eyes of the fascist. Professor Quadri, for example, seems to Marcello to be nothing but a sordid ‘hunchback’ weakling squatted in a study amidst an ‘enormous quantity of books’ while peering short-sightedly from ‘a curiously flat, asymmetrical face, like a papier-mâché mask … a face that had nothing real or reliable about it.’


Stevan Eldred-Grigg