Alberto Moravia
Il disprezzo

Today, I wanted to bring back to your memory this novel by Moravia, an author who in recent years has somewhat fallen into oblivion, despite being one of the few Italian intellectuals capable of capturing in prose the state of mind of Italian society in the '50s.

In 'Contempt,' the protagonist is Riccardo, the prototype of the average middle-class man, happily married (to Emilia), with a job that is not too fulfilling but enough to guarantee him a necessary salary to pay the house installments. His whole life, in short, seems to be proceeding on pre-determined tracks when suddenly, without apparent reason, his wife confesses she is no longer in love with him, in fact, even disdains him. His world falls apart; everything he had built over years of sacrifices was going up in smoke, and for what reason? The biggest question mark for Riccardo is indeed his inability to find an answer to this behavior.

Beyond the plot and the few characters populating the novel, what emerges, as in other novels by Moravia, is apathy, indifference, a wave of greyness that populates the homes of the petty bourgeoisie, in which even the landscapes of Capri seem illuminated by a dim light. In this arid context, splendidly rendered through a dry and essential style, stand Riccardo, Emilia, and their relationship, a true love perhaps, but never tangible, almost abstract, and so precarious that as soon as the ‘uncivilized woman’ feels some security slipping away, she decides to let everything collapse, without considering that perhaps a solution can be found. It matters little about the Freudian reinterpretation of the Odyssey proposed by the director Rheingold, in which the events of Ulysses so closely resemble those of Riccardo, because the only reality is that Emilia no longer loves him, and that is all.