In the Fascist Shadow

...In the Fascist Shadow 1934 By Alberto Moravia Translated by William Weaver Farrar, Straus, Giroux 297 pp $14 50 Reviewed by John Shepley Short story writer, translator Durer's famous angel, Melenco/ia, has a way of alighting in some unexpected places One of these is the first page of Alberto Moravia's new novel (published in Italy in 1982), where the symbol of intellectual depression turns up as a passenger on a boat from Naples to Capri The time is 1934,12 years after Mussolini's accession to power and the year following Hitler's Lucio, the 27-year-old narrator (Moravia, too, was born in 1907), is obsessed by the question "Is it possible to live in despair and not wish for death...

...A graduate of a German university, the author of a thesis on Kleist and a would-be novelist, he wants to "stabilize" his despair and transform it into "the normal condition of existence," hoping thereby to be relieved of the urge to kill himself If he can plausibly contrive the suicide of his novel's hero, he thinks, there will be no need for him to follow suit "I would save myself through writing " The sight of the woman on the boat overturns this resolution Lucio embarks on a prolonged flirtation with her, endures the insults of her husband and pursues the couple (who turn out to be Germans) to a pensione in Ana-capn So attuned is he to the situation he has created that he even guesses their name out of thin air Muller Before long, he is attributing to Beate Muller, with apparent confirmation forthcoming at every step, the motives of Heinnch von kleist, and casting himself as a male Hennette Vogel, the woman with whom the German Romantic writer carried out a double suicide pact The game is suspended only temporarily when the Mullers leave the island to return to Germany They will be replaced by Beate's mother and twin sister, Trude, with whom, Beate explains, she and her husband will cross paths in Naples It is soon obvious, of course, that the twin sisters are a fiction Beate and Trude are the same woman The problem is which, if either, is the "real" one—the melancholy, suffering, suicidal Beate, or the vulgar, gluttonous "life-loving" Trude, an exuberant Nazi From then on, nothing is quite what it seems Lucio, in fact, is the victim of a hoax Mother and daughter turn out to be a lesbian couple A package containing shoes is replaced by one with a bomb, and before it has a chance to go of f, the package is found to contain shoes after all The tale of the bomb emerges from the past of a Russian woman named Soma, who works as secretary to the art collector Shapiro and leads the degraded life of a local "character" on Capri, picking up waiters, carriage drivers and boatmen Shapiro and Soma stand apart from the main action of 1934, the narrator turns to them when he has to kill time while awaiting a tryst with Beate/Trude ButSoma'slongaccount of her youth in a Russian terrorist group prior to World War I serves to reinforce, at the other end of the political spectrum, one of Moravia's persistent themes—the abuses of power and lust brought about by the confusion (not to say dissociation) of identity Soma's lover at the time had been a double agent who "when he looked in the mirror, didn't know whether he was seeing a revolutionary or an informer He was both, and he was one because he was the other, and vice versa " In their lovemaking, Soma had been exhorted to call him her slave, her serf "I thought it was the relationship between two party comrades who also loved each other Actually, it was the relationship of a bourgeois with his whore," she tells Lucio Lucio, too, undergoes humiliation and sexual manipulation An anti-F ascist, he is conned by Herr Muller into giving a Fascist salute in the dining room of the pensione On a boat with Trude, she obliges him to lower his bathing trunks so that she can inspect him and be sure he is not circumcised She then uses his foot to masturbate herself One grows a little impatient with this fellow, he seems a poseur, a prig and a fool The project for "stabilizing despair" that he describes to everyone seems all too literary and artificial, especially since he acknowledges his "familiar mood of despair at not being in despair " Yet it is precisely this ambiguity that enables him to carry out his assigned role to interrogate himself and others, to probe, to ask what are often the wrong questions and thereby elicit lengthy confessions Capri itself—at first an unlikely setting for the somber thoughts and morbid impulses accompanying an examination of political sadism—suddenly becomes the ideal stage for this masquerade and the proper destination for Durer's gloomy angel The sphinx that overlooks the sea as Lucio follows Soma up the steps of Shapiro's villa ensures that although a charade is being enacted, the right questions will ultimately be asked It takes the intrusion of Hitler (talking on the radio) to restore these actors-and the reader-no reality In a brilliantly executed and appalling scene in the stuffy, oppressive, 19th-century parlor of the pensione, the German guests gather to listen to their Fuhrer, while an animated argument breaks out between two of them over the supposed virtues of the traditional German student duel This is too much for Lucio, who for the moment abandons his efforts to separate the personae of Beate and Trude The art collector Shapiro (clearly modeled on Bernard Berenson) is trundled on stage to impart a cynical and ironic bit of advice to the vounger man on how to overcome despair "Get rich Then Hitler is heard congratulating himself on the crushing of a "conspiracy "in Germany-it is the Night of the Long Knives A double suKide takes place on schedule, and a tragic dimension is restored...