Description
Rare first French edition
of one of Alberto Moravia’s masterpieces.
A very beautiful copy, one of 30 leading copies on chiffon wove paper,
preserved in its publisher’s wrappers, as issued.
Moravia, Alberto. L’Ennui.
Flammarion, 1961.
8vo [213 x 155 mm] de 250 pp., (1) p.
Publisher’s wrappers. Untrimmed and partially uncut copy. Contemporary wrappers.
Rare first French edition of one of Alberto Moravia’s masterpieces.
One of 30 leading copies on chiffon wove paper.
“L’Ennui by Alberto Moravia is one of the most mysterious novels there is, maybe surpassing, because of its inimitable poetic dimension, Sartre’s very intelligent (too intelligent?) Nausée, which was supposed to be called “La mélancolie”.” (Pour une relecture d’Alberto Moravia, Eléments pour la civilisation européenne, N°120-128)
In this novel, Moravia once again finds the quality inspiration from his first novels. Conscience stares at reality without managing to accept it, it reduces sentiments to stereotypes, the characters to clichéd roles. Cecilia is the most original and fascinating character of this novel, a witness to a new society born out of the war: she is at the same time free and alienated, a stranger to the language and the culture considered as a trace of human order, but deprived of all hypocrisy or falseness, reduced to her pure vitality and to a present devoid of memory. The encounter between Cecilia and Dino is an assessment of the end of a society, one that prevailed in Moravia’s previous novels, of the arrival of a new world born out of consumerism. Beyond its value of testimony, this novel is also the beautiful and painful history of a passion that tries to become love, of an impossibility to communicate that metamorphoses into the acceptance of the other.
A very beautiful copy, one of 30 leading copies on chiffon wove paper, preserved in its publisher’s wrappers, as issued.
