Alberto Moravia's The Conformist, perhaps his most famous novel, was in many ways a convincing portrait of fascist psychology, but I for one never understood what lesbianism had to do with it all…. Still less could I make out in Moravia's last novel, Time of Desecration, what mother-daughter incest, troilism, and sodomy had to do with terrorism in present-day Italy. Now 1934 returns us to the lesbian-fascist nexus (again with incestuous overtones), and in a subplot we hear about two sodomitical Trotskyites in pre-revolutionary Russia. Don't Christian Democrats ever get kinky?

Moravia's earlier stories were often brilliant little studies of erotic compulsion. But the erotic component has steadily drained away, until all we are now left with is the compulsion. Time of Desecration read less like a novel than a case study of sexual pathology, and one notices an almost clinical quality to Moravia's writing in 1934 as well….

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