Albert Camus suggested that suicide was the only philosophical question, and Alberto Moravia's new novel ["1934"] centers on a character who thinks of little else. More precisely, he wonders whether suicide is the only solution to despair or whether despair may not, as he puts it, be stabilized, accepted as "the normal condition of man … as natural as the air we breathe." "What did I mean by 'stabilize'? Somehow, imagining my life as a Nation, to institutionalize despair, recognize it officially … as a law of that same Nation."

Lucio is a young Italian hanging about Capri, peering into the melancholy eyes of Beate, a German woman he has met there. He is a student of literature, a translator of Heinrich von Kleist, the German dramatic poet whose short life ended in a double suicide, and he sees in the girl's "unhappy and stubborn look" not only a trace of...