[In the following review, Cancogni faults the stories in Erotic Tales as lacking "that playful self-consciousness, that narrative delight and that titillating suggestiveness" that would justify the collection's title. ]

A lesbian's obsession with what she euphemistically calls "the thing" enslaves her to a pony. A nurse's morbid fascination with what she somewhat blasphemously terms "the Unknown God" leads her to the unwitting murder of one of her patients. A widower's desperate search for his lost wife eventually brings him to the realization that what he really wants, after all, is what his wife shares with thousands of other women of the same age and build: "While it's impossible to replace a face, the genitals, on the other hand, have certain physical similarities, are interchangeable." A woman longingly caresses the belt with which her husband—in an excess of refined sadism—no longer whips her. A pedophilic scientist sells his soul to a devil who is disguised as a provocative little girl. According to Alberto Moravia, a writer is someone who is not afraid to knock down taboos to venture into unexplored territories.

To this day, Mr. Moravia, now in his late 70's, remains the most widely read and filmed Italian novelist, one of Italy's major export commodities. Of course, there is a reason for this. From his very first book, Gli Indifferenti of 1929 (translated into English as The Time of Indifference), Mr. Moravia has been the spokesman of his age, a committed ideologist of the various traumas and malaises that have affected modern society, with particular emphasis on the upper middle class (generally represented by the Roman bourgeoisie) and its complex sexuality, which he sees as a symptom of the fundamental alienation of modern man.

The original Italian title (borrowed from the first tale) was La Cosa, and, as we shall see, there were good reasons for it. Why has it been translated, or rather transformed, into Erotic Tales? To what extent, in fact, are the tales in this collection erotic?

If one accepts Roland Barthes's definition of the erotic as suggestively sketched in The Pleasure of the Text—"It is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces or, rather, the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance"—if one accepts this, none of the 20 tales in the collection are, strictly speaking, erotic.

The first six tales, all fairly long, deal quite explicitly with different forms of sexual obsession. Nothing is suggested, nothing is left to the imagination. No room for eros or desire. As the title of the first story clearly indicates, sex is "The Thing," at worst an object, at best a fetish. In any case, sex is reified, named, that is to say, mechanized, deeroticized, theorized.

The first story could be read as an antifeminist treatise. Even lesbians, it tells us, are obsessed with The Thing, the Phallus. The second story is a more delicate variation on the same theme: if woman does not want to become a murderess, she must maintain a relationship of mystic veneration with the male member. In this phallocentric universe, women are either reduced to their sex (the "thing" the inconsolable widower of the third story yearns to recover) or pulverized out of existence—which amounts to the same thing, as the fate of the devilish female in "The Devil Can't Save the World" shows. In either case, men end up alone, meditating under the stars.

The remaining 14 tales (all much shorter than the first six) are not openly concerned with sex; they deal with other "things," other obsessions, other dysfunctions, from a morbid interest in guns to the nuclear extermination of ants; from the fear of stuttering to the need to strangle. Only the objects change—the characters remain essentially the same (down to the descriptions of their features), as do their problems, and the plots of their stories are mostly built around more or less obsolete literary stereotypes: the mask, the devil, the painter (confronting the reality of his painting), the double, the dream within the dream, the epistolary narrative, the perpetually elusive line between fiction and reality. Unfortunately, however, neither the expressionistic style nor the ideological import of the stories allows any of these literary ploys to transcend its station and soar into the more rarefied, atmosphere of parody. Though the English translation lends a lighter gait to Mr. Moravia's thick-ankled prose, the language of these stories remains pedestrian: they are written (and read) without pleasure. In other words, they lack that playful self-consciousness, that narrative delight and that titillating suggestiveness that would justify the title of Erotic Tales. Rather, the starkness of their style, the recurrence of their themes, the scabrous, nightmarish quality of their vision and their ill-concealed moralism would better fit under the generic rubric of case histories.