SOURCE: A review of Erotic Tales, in The Times Literary Supplement, December 20, 1985, p. 1464.

In the following review, Mars-Jones faults the collected stories in Erotic Tales as "morbid and facile."

The Italian title of Alberto Moravia's [Erotic Tales] has no pretensions to eroticism: it translates as The Thing And Other Stories. The translator, or whoever it was that came up with the more selling title, can't altogether be blamed. There is in many of these stories a heavy sexual preoccupation, though Moravia can be cleared of any charge of seeking to provoke undue enjoyment.

"The Thing," once the title story and still in first place, shows Moravia at his most lurid and trivial. It portrays the relationship between two women called Diana and Margherita. Here's Margherita:

She was standing under the portico of the villa with her legs apart, her hands on her hips. Tall and thickly built with...