SOURCE: A review of Two Adolescents, in Atlantic Monthly, August, 1950, pp. 84-5.

In the following excerpted review of Two Adolescents, Rolo praises Moravia's "brilliantly realized portrayal" of the sexual awakening of the thirteen-year-old title character of Agostino and finds Disobedience a disagreeable but perceptive story of a different crisis of adolescence.

[From] Italy comes Alberto Moravia's Two Adolescents a pair of novelettes, Agostino and Disobedience, which deal with the emotional turmoil of adolescence. . . .

Moravia is well endowed with two qualities which do not often come together in equal proportions: he is both an extremely vigorous, sharply realistic storyteller and a shrewd, searching psychologist. Though written in colloquial and rather graceless prose, his work has a strongly distinctive individuality—harsh, energetic, and supercharged with sexuality; and more often than not it achieves a pretty powerful impact.

It certainly does in Agostino, a brilliantly realized portrayal of the sexual awakening...