Boredom, Alberto Moravia

NYRB Classics edition of Alberto Moravia’s novel Boredom.

I’ve read only one of Alberto Moravia’s novels before: Contempt (Italian title Il disprezzo, also adapted into a 1963 film by Jean-Luc Godard), and it was one of the most upsetting reading experiences I’ve had in a while, to the point where it made me feel physically ill. It’s narrated by a man whose much-loved wife suddenly becomes cold and distant, for reasons he doesn’t understand but which are telegraphed to the reader. She insists that her feelings have not changed, and she doesn’t fight with him, but she doesn’t want to sleep in the same bed anymore, and she clearly doesn’t take the pleasure in his company that she once did. In his confusion and grief he interrogates her mercilessly, trying to learn what has happened, but this only fuels her continued withdrawal. If you’ve recently been through a painful breakup or if you’re at all insecure in your relationship, perhaps save Contempt for another time.

Despite this, I wanted to return to Moravia, whose writing has a quality I particularly value: the articulation, with as much precision as possible, of specific states of mind, along with an exploration of the exact nature of the light coming through the cracked and tinted lenses through which we perceive our lives and those of others. These are the same qualities I love in Proust, and you get them with Moravia in a more funny, plot-forward, concise, and readable version (although somewhat less subtle, more cynical, and, unfortunately, greatly more misogynistic).

I read the bulk of Boredom (Italian title La Noia, 1960) on a train from Mannheim to Berlin, where I’d made the rookie mistake of booking a ticket but not reserving a seat. There was no seat for me, and for about half of the five-hour ride I had to sit on the floor near the door with my bags. Since Boredom is about suffering — and specifically a petty kind of self-inflicted suffering — it made appropriate reading material.

The narrator, Dino, is the aimless son of a very rich widow who has spent most of his life fighting off a deep feeling of boredom. His idea of boredom, which he devotes the first part of the novel to explaining, is a kind of alienation from the things of the world, a feeling of disconnection that makes it impossible to take an interest in life:

For many people, boredom is the opposite of amusement, and amusement means distraction, forgetfulness. For me, boredom is not the opposite of amusement; I might even go so far as to say that in certain of its aspects it actually resembles amusement inasmuch as it gives rise to distraction and forgetfulness, even if of a very special type … My boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality—just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust. The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable to convince me of its own effective existence.

A connection he does not explore but which occurs to me here is boredom’s relationship to melancholy. Both arise from a kind of alienation from life, but one is accompanied by sadness, and the other by a feeling of absurdity and annoyance.

Dino became a painter in his youth in the hope of warding off boredom, but as the novel opens he hasn’t been able to paint in years. He locates the source of his boredom in his wealth: the knowledge that he will never have to face real hardship, he reasons, separates him from the material world.

He observes the lives of various people around him, especially his mother and his neighbor, a fellow painter named Balestrieri. They are creatures of habit: all their days have mostly the same shape, and their routines seldom vary. Dino, on the other hand, is impulsive and capricious. His life is more varied, but he is bored while they are not (here I think of the “habit is a replacement for happiness” line from Eugene Onegin).

There’s a wonderful early scene where he visits his mother and, following a whim, promises her that he’ll move back in with her. She is delighted by the prospect and gifts him a fancy new sports car. Later, he has a flirtation with his mother’s new maid. Alone together in his old bedroom, they’re about to have a sexual encounter:

I guided her hand toward the enter of my body, and as soon as I was sure that her hand had closed, I let go of it. She was now standing quite still, bending slightly forward, her arm stretched out over me, a lively red in her cheeks below the two dark circles of her glasses. Then she said in a slow, contented voice: “How disgusting!”

He hears it as the voice of his own self-disgust. He flees the house shortly after and doesn’t speak to his mother for months.

Dino’s boredom is later, depending on your interpretation, either exacerbated or eliminated by his growing obsession with a young woman named Cecilia, formerly the mistress of his artist neighbor Balestrieri. When Balestrieri dies suddenly, the rumor is that he died in some obscure way because of her — either from heartsickness or too-vigorous lovemaking. Cecilia doesn’t seem very distraught by the painter’s death, and almost immediately afterward she offers herself frankly and eagerly to Dino.

Here, the novel takes a few predictable turns that, at times, seem directly lifted from the “jealousy” sections of Proust. Dino is initially repelled by Cecilia, who in addition to not being very beautiful, seems almost completely passive and has little interest in making conversation. Still, she shows up at his studio reliably for sex. When one day she fails to appear at the time he expects her (Odette’s move in Swann in Love), he realizes he’s in deeper than he thought. Her reluctance to talk about her thoughts and feelings, her apparent indifference to him as a person, and indeed her passive sexual compliance, makes Dino feel powerless. She is unfaithful to him without remorse and sees no reason not to do as she likes.

Dino longs to leave Cecilia, but he is also in thrall to her. He imagines that if he can extract some kind of confession or commitment from her, he’ll get bored with her and thus be able to break things off. These sections feel reminiscent not only of Proust but of Benjamin Constant’s novel Adolphe (previously), another novel about a man who longs to escape from his lover but, because of his fear of confrontation and unwillingness to let go of certain ideas about himself, is unable to do so.

Schopenhauer’s famous statement that we spend most of our lives in a state of either boredom or suffering — and that we escape one only to be consumed by the other — is applicable to Dino’s condition. Early on he thinks that the suffering of poverty would end his boredom, but when he suffers at his inability to possess Cecilia, he wishes only that he could be bored again. He doesn’t see that his boredom (at least by his own definition) has in fact deepened: he is incapable of understanding Cecilia as a real person rather than an abstraction designed to torment him.

This part of Boredom is what bored me the most, running as it does along fairly well-worn tracks — not only Proust, but novels like Of Human Bondage where men suffer from enthrallment by women whom they don’t even like very much. One of Proust’s rare quotable lines is Swann’s lament from the end of Swann in Love: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”

But I’d still recommend Boredom, in particular for its first hundred pages, while Dino is still bouncing around being rude to his mother, meditating on his self-loathing, and trying to locate the cause of his own aimlessness. The novel might have sustained my interest more if it had been willing to let Dino be bored a little longer.