A finely attentive and judging engagement with the female predicament has always disinguished Alberto Moravia's work from that of conventional male well-wishers. The speaking subjects of the 30 self-portraits voiced in [The Voice of The Sea and Other Stories] make up an alertly differentiated chorus of ever more recognisable and unsettling identity. In brief, lucid accounts of harmonising or counter-pointed theme, Moravia's women interpret, with ominous detachment, their estrangement in contexts where they figure chiefly as commodities. (pp. 219-20)

Moravia's watchful prose alertly notices the bewildered, involuntary nature of these self-assertions; the puzzled, distant challenge to themselves of women who confront, behind their 'enigmatic' narrations, the strangers of their consciousness. (p. 220)

Zahir Jamal, in New Statesman (© 1978 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), August 18, 1978.