The Voice of the Sea is a collection of thirty stories—all written in the first person, and all narrated by women. Moravia's Roman ladies are a predatory bunch, maintaining a firm metaphorical grip on the balls of the men they choose to make contact with. What is interesting about them is the fact that they are curiously insubstantial, in spite of the numerous references to their bodies: those carefully described breasts and pudenda could just as well belong to some other species. Their various states of mind are set down rather clinically, so that one seems to be reading a series of case-histories. The psychological dossier is no substitute for the achieved work of the imagination.

With one exception, the monologues in The Voice of the Sea are mercifully short—the screams fade away after three or four pages. Some of the trick endings would make O...