1934 By Alberto Moravia Farrar, 297 pp., $14.50
1934 has both the physique and the ambivalent voice of a Shakespearean problem play. There are black urges, sardonic comedy, and that peculiar foredoomed sense—which, in Measure for Measure, say, is more external manipulation than tragic drive. Capri, the island, might as well be an Elizabethan theater: one sea-enclosed set: characters enter and exit by boat, and their offstage life is unproven supposition. Moravia, furthermore, has double-knit a plot so intricate that it hovers close to pure contrivance: mistaken identity, extravagant coincidence, and some unbelievable motivation. But you reckon, too, that an adroit master is stress-fracturing nature here: one who had gotten impatient with the punctilio of fiction, in particular with realism and its mechanistic etiquette.
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