The Conformist

Alberto Moravia

Sep. 2011 · Steerforth

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Secrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now in exile, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open - and with it the corrupt heart of Fascism. Moravia equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychological needs of his protagonist for whom conformity becomes an obsession in a life that has included parental neglect, an oddly self-conscious desire to engage in cruel acts, and a type of male beauty which, to Clerici's great distress, other men find attractive.

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The author of numerous novels, story and essay collections, and works of journalism and travel literature, Alberto Moravia was Italy's preeminent man of letters throughout much of the twentieth-century. Steerforth Press is restoring many of his best works to print, including the novels The Woman of Rome, The Time of Indifference, and Two Women. In the winter of 2000, Steerforth will publish for the first time in English the biographical work, Life of Moravia.