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The Conformist
[Paperback - 1999]
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Category: Fiction
Sub-category: Literary Fiction
Additional Category: Psychological Fiction - Thrillers
Publisher: Steerforth | ISBN: 9781883642655 | Pages: 336
Shipping Weight: .295 | Dimensions: 5.4 x .86 x 8.3 inches

Secrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now in exile, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open - and with it the corrupt heart of Fascism. Moravia equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychological needs of his protagonist for whom conformity becomes an obsession in a life that has included parental neglect, an oddly self-conscious desire to engage in cruel acts, and a type of male beauty which, to Clerici's great distress, other men find attractive.

Alberto Moravia (1907–1990), the child of a wealthy family, was raised at home because of illness. He published his first novel, The Time of Indifference, at the age of twenty-three. Banned from publishing under Mussolini, he emerged after World War II as one of the most admired and influential of twentieth-century Italian writers. In addition to Agostino, New York Review Classics publishes Moravia’s novels Boredom and Contempt.

Michael F. Moore is the chair of the PEN/Heim translation fund. His translations from the Italian include, most recently, Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi, The Drowned and The Saved by Primo Levi, and Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi. He is currently working on a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.

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