Durer's famous angel, Melencolia, has a way of alighting in some unexpected places. One of these is the first page of Alberto Moravia's new novel [1934] …, where the symbol of intellectual depression turns up as a passenger on a boat from Naples to Capri…. If [the narrator Lucio] can plausibly contrive the suicide of his novel's hero, he thinks, there will be no need for him to follow suit: "I would save myself through writing."

The sight of the woman on the boat overturns this resolution. Lucio embarks on a prolonged flirtation with her, endures the insults of her husband and pursues the couple (who turn out to be Germans) to a pensione in Anacapri. So attuned is he to the situation he has created that he even guesses their name out of thin air: Müller.

Before long, he is attributing to Beate Müller, with apparent confirmation forthcoming at every step, the motives of Heinrich von Kleist, and casting himself as a male Henriette Vogel, the woman with whom the German Romantic writer carried out a double suicide pact. The game is suspended only temporarily when the Müllers leave the island to return to Germany. They will be replaced by Beate's mother and twin sister, Trude, with whom, Beate explains, she and her husband will cross paths in Naples.

It is soon obvious, of course, that the twin sisters are a fiction: Beate and Trude are the same woman. The problem is which, if either, is the "real" one—the melancholy, suffering, suicidal Beate, or the vulgar, gluttonous "life-loving" Trude, an exuberant Nazi. From then on, nothing is quite what it seems. Lucio, in fact, is the victim of a hoax. Mother and daughter turn out to be a lesbian couple. A package containing shoes is replaced by one with a bomb, and before it has a chance to go off, the package is found to contain shoes after all….

[Lucio] undergoes humiliation and sexual manipulation. An anti-Fascist, he is conned by Herr Müller into giving a Fascist salute in the dining room of the pensione. On a boat with Trude, she obliges him to lower his bathing trunks so that she can inspect him and be sure he is not circumcised. She then uses his foot to masturbate herself. One grows a little impatient with this fellow; he seems a poseur, a prig and a fool. The project for "stabilizing despair" that he describes to everyone seems all too literary and artificial, especially since he acknowledges his "familiar mood of despair at not being in despair."

Yet it is precisely this ambiguity that enables him to carry out his assigned role: to interrogate himself and others, to probe, to ask what are often the wrong questions and thereby elicit lengthy confessions. Capri itself—at first an unlikely setting for the somber thoughts and morbid impulses accompanying an examination of political sadism—suddenly becomes the ideal stage for this masquerade and the proper destination for Dürer's gloomy angel. The sphinx that overlooks the sea as Lucio follows Sonia up the steps of Shapiro's villa ensures that although a charade is being enacted, the right questions will ultimately be asked.

It takes the intrusion of Hitler (talking on the radio) to restore these actors—and the reader—to reality. In a brilliantly executed and appalling scene in the stuffy, oppressive, 19th-century parlor of the pensione, the German guests gather to listen to their Führer, while an animated argument breaks out between two of them over the supposed virtues of the traditional German student duel. This is too much for Lucio, who for the moment abandons his efforts to separate the personae of Beate and Trude. The art collector Shapiro (clearly modeled on Bernard Berenson) is trundled on stage to impart a cynical and ironic bit of advice to the younger man on how to overcome despair: "Get rich." Then Hitler is heard congratulating himself on the crushing of a "conspiracy" in Germany—it is the Night of the Long Knives. A double suicide takes place on schedule, and a tragic dimension is restored.