Alberto Moravia, has now, with the publication of his new book Time of Desecration, announced that he … is finished writing novels…. [He declares] that the time is so spiritually destroyed, it is no longer possible to write. This last novel of his, he implies, will supply the final literary proof of the barrenness in which we endure, more dead than alive, without the thought or feeling necessary to the act of self-creation embodied in the writing of fiction. (p. 37)

Time of Desecration is an extraordinarily controlled piece of work, heavy-handed in its allegorical intentions, emotionally unconvincing, narrow, obsessive, ungenerous. The limits of discovery seem to have been set well in advance of the writing, and thus a mechanistic atmosphere is lent to the entire proceedings. Neither Desideria or anyone else in the book functions outside the highly contrived "self-description" imposed by the author, description remarkable chiefly for its...