SOURCE: "A Novelist of Detachment," in The Times Literary Supplement, July 5, 1947, p. 333.

In the following assessment of Agostino, the author commends Moravia for his use of detachment and delicate handling of an adolescent in crisis.

Agostino was one of the works of Signor Moravia's enforced and uncomfortable seclusion [after the author fell into disgrace with the Fascist authorities]. Published in 1944, it gained the prize for the best Italian novel of the year in 1945. It is a brilliant and delicate—though some of its details are supremely indelicate—study of a crisis of adolescence undergone by a boy of thirteen, the only son of a beautiful widow. It may strike some readers as a supreme instance of artistic detachment that an author, while in hiding from a tyranny that was bringing Europe to ruins, should be so absorbed with but one aspect of its decadence—and should approach his...