The Voyeur

From Publishers Weekly Restricted in scale and with a limited cast, Moravia's old preserve of sexual obsession is occupied in this latest novel by a 35-year-old intellectual, a professor of French literature locked in oedipal combat with his aged but still-vital father, a famous physicist and academic "baron." The father is upheld by the bourgeois establishment, the son a one-time student activist who surrenders, as a protest against private property, all claim to the handsome flat bequeathed to him by his mother. His wife seems to desire the flat; she also desires an extramarital arrangement with the father. The son, for his part, envisions the nuclear explosion of the dome of St. Peter's and the imminent end of the world. When Moravia confines himself to his restless characters, the novel progresses fluidly enough, but he yields far too often to his weakness for conceptual trappings. The father-son disagreements are tiresome, and differing views about the nuclear bomb are not presented with any new drama. But it's gratifying to observe that Moravia, at age 80, has lost none of his engergy and agility. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The narrator of Moravia's latest novel, a 35-year-old professor of French literature, is walking down the streets of Rome, thinking of an erotic poem by Mallarme, when he sees a young black woman gazing out of her apartment window. At that moment, he becomes fascinated with the woman, with his own fascination, and with the concept of voyeurism literary and literal. His obsession with the subject and with this aspect of his own character leads him (not without irony) to suspect that his wife Silvia is having an affair with his father, a distinguished physics professor who is bedridden from a car accident and in whose apartment the couple lives. This story of love, obsession, and self-discovery is so skillfully wrought and so absolutely absorbing that it may make reading itself seem fraught with voyeur