Agostino was one of the works of Signor Moravia's enforced and uncomfortable seclusion [after the author fell into disgrace with the Fascist authorities]. Published in 1944, it gained the prize for the best Italian novel of the year in 1945. It is a brilliant and delicate—though some of its details are supremely indelicate—study of a crisis of adolescence undergone by a boy of thirteen, the only son of a beautiful widow. It may strike some readers as a supreme instance of artistic detachment that an author, while in hiding from a tyranny that was bringing Europe to ruins, should be so absorbed with but one aspect of its decadence—and should approach his subject with such complete objectivity. The scene is an Italian bathing beach at the height of summer, the characters are Italian, like the air that surrounds them, and the age-old influences, atavistic and physical, that have formed them. Agostino's mother has no scruples about attracting a young lover; that just happens, and her actions seem to be regarded as perfectly natural. The young and ruffianly boys, with whom in his worried apprehension that his mother is just a woman, Agostino humiliatingly forgathers, are not presented in order to raise questions of juvenile delinquency, character-training and so forth. Cricket has not been played, and never will be, on that field. But if morals and cricket can be left at home, and only then, will the English reader succeed in appreciating Signor Moravia's object. This is to depict Agostino's mental torture when driven from the paradise of childhood, his humiliating initiation into sensual realities by his low playmates, and his ineffectual attempt to rid himself of an overwhelming obsession. The boy's failure lies in his inability either to recapture his reverence for the affectionate mother, who is entirely unaware of his mental agony, or to exorcise that memory of a being whose affection, with its acts of familiar and unthinking immodesty, now wears an ugly look.

Signor Moravia's success lies in his forcible rendering of character, scene and mental state. True, it is not a pleasant subject to reflect on, and the unpleasantnesses take place, although without lubricity, in the brightest illumination; nevertheless, it is a work devoid of meanness or vulgarity.