SOURCE: A review of Two Adolescents, in The Listener, December 25, 1952, p. 1087.

In the following excerpt, Spender faults Two Adolescents as being calculated and contrived, but finds Moravia's use of the unexpected extremely captivating.

Moravia's two studies of adolescence [in Two Adolescents] have a strangely German quality, reminiscent of Thomas Mann. They are written with a consciousness of art crossed with a consciousness of psychology which are perhaps too evident to the reader. Into this formidable mixture there is infused a tumescent sensuality which is extremely disturbing. It is difficult not to discover in the orgiastic descriptions of the carryings on of the boys on the bathing beach in the first of these stories Agostino and in the scene where the governess incites Luca in the second, Disobedience, an element of lasciviousness which goes beyond the needs of art. It must be admitted though that Moravia's sensuality is really...